THE GETTING OF WISDOM
I’ve been feeling strangely autumnal this winter. I live in a place where seasons bleed into each other. Grass shifts from scorched to burnt to slightly less burnt. Trees are leafy, then become… less leafy. Only the frangipanis in the neighbourhood respect the boundary between the seasons. Their perfect pentamerous petals bloom yellow-white year round, except in winter, when they shed their leaves leaving bare stumps poking out of the ground. I imagine their stumps are antlers from mythical stags that hibernate underground.
Anyway, back to my sense of autumnal nostalgia. I was advising a friend who was putting together a PhD proposal. She thanked me profusely for my insight. With a start, I suddenly realised I didn’t come up with the advice, I was merely peddling information my own PhD supervisor, Andi Spark, had told me many years ago when I’d started on a similar creative journey.
My supervisor had since left the university, hence the feeling of nostalgia I felt thinking about the cycle of knowledge— how it is acquired and lost and the responsibility of those who have knowledge to transmit it to others. The more I thought about it, the more I realised I wasn’t really sad. I was ‘sad-wise’. I was happy I had gained wisdom but also sad because it was at the expense of getting older.
And I jumped on to Facebook and asked all my friends if there was a better word for what I was feeling, and this is what they came up with:
Mono no aware
Something in-between Wehmut and Entwicklung
Saudade
Desiderium
Freduenschade
WhileI love how other languages have words that don’t have an exact English translation, the best explanation for me came from my friend Tim who I hope won’t mind that I’ve copied and pasted his idea.
He says that the word I”m looking for is simply ‘wisdom’. It’s just the sadness/ time part of it isn’t understood until the reader reaches a certain age. So all of these growing older/ growing wiser sentiments were brewing inside me as I welcomed my uni students back into the classroom today for the first time since Covid, and I played my role as a cog in this whole great cycle of the passing of wisdom
I’m so glad there’s only a few more days of winter. I will post something a bit more hopeful in spring.
