SOME WORDS OF WISDOM FROM AN OCTOGENERIAN, ME

“When finger is showing the moon, the fool is looking at the finger and the wise man looking at the moon.” -Chinese Proverb

To me, wisdom is a very complex, unique and interesting word. It represents more than knowledge and cleverness. Wisdom is also associated with inner feelings, intuition and cooperation of the mind and the body. Words of wisdom are not just wise, it is the quality of being wise.

You can be knowledgeable with other people’s knowledge but you can’t be wise with other people’s knowledge. Wisdom could only be acquired from many years of experience and experience-generated knowledge. Wisdom is entwined with understanding, common sense, unbiased judgement, compassion and virtues like ethics, benevolence and morality.

Experiential self-knowledge is the foundation of wisdom. Experience, as often presumed is not just what happened to a person in life, but what the person have done with that event, and what he or she has learned from it. Experiential knowledge could only occur by paying full attention to the event, thinking about it, analyzing and investigating cause-and-effect relationships of the event and learning from it. This type of learning is deep and always associated with very strong, long-term memory formation. 

I have lived long enough and have experienced many fortuitous life events, as well as events related to my professional life as a doctor. I believe I have become a wise man, and encouraged enough to share some words of wisdom with my readers, as we approach the holiday season, together with my best wishes:

1-    The most important decision you will make in your life is not your profession, it’s not which university to attend, which city to live in but is who to get married to. Because you are going to spend the rest 40- to- 50 year of your life with that person. She would be the mother of your children, she would help or hinder your career, she would provide crucial support when your life goes sour. She would become your second half. Therefore the main question to ask before marriage decision should be, “what do we have in common?” The more you have in common the better it is. Because over time, when love, lust and physical beauty diminish, married life becomes boring. Under these circumstances, only commonness will save your marriage with formation of profound friendship, understanding, caring and companionship.

2-    To succeed in life and in your carrier, I suggest that you follow the success formula of world-renowned scientist Albert Einstein like I did. It goes like this: Success = X+Y+Z. In this formula X presents hard work. You have to give your best in whatever you are doing. Y presents knowledge. You have to follow and study knowledge, as well as apply it to your work. Without knowledge, just physical hard work would not cut it. Z presents “zip your mouth.” According to an ancient Greek mythology, people carry their sins and their mistakes in a sack on their back. That is why we can easily see other people mistakes and sins but not our own. We can’t be objective about ourselves. We should know that nobody is perfect. We all make mistakes. We should have this understanding and not to talk behind anybody’s back. There is a Turkish saying that “ground has ears, sooner or later the person will hear what you said about him or her in a most malicious way”.

3-   Learn a second language, become bilingual. It will increase your memory capacity, prevent senility and widen your world. It will encourage you to visit, to study or to work in other countries. You will discover that there are different people and different cultures in the world and your view of the world will change. You would become a world citizen. You would appreciate that Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom has created countless different creators and different people for a reason. Can you imagine how boring our life would have become if we all look the same, talk the same and behave the same? Therefore appreciate, embrace and celebrate the differences. They make our life interesting and challenging.