I suppose I am in the habit of equating older with wiser. Recently I went to my father’s funeral, but as I listened to people twenty-plus years older than me talk about the same things people twenty-plus years younger than me talk about, I realized it’s not just the years that make us wiser. The only way to gain wisdom is by consciously engaging with the questions. This is no easy task, Jung remarked that most people stay at the lowest level of consciousness because it’s far easier. Coming to consciousness is painful because it involves suffering the change, we have to let go of who we use to be in order to become who we might be. How easy it is to get sidetracked with all the activity of daily life, it leaves little time to wrestle with the questions that require us to change and transform. These quiet inner urgings easily fade away if we don’t make the effort to hear what they have to say. It takes time and attention to what is going on in our lives in order to make these connections, an active engagement with the paradoxical nature of life.

Relationships tend to derail us like nothing else, but they can also be the greatest tool for deepening awareness. In fact our intimate relationships guarantee to highlight everything that irritates us and needs work. The only difference is whether we choose to ignore these promptings or follow where they lead. Rilke has said that the most we could hope for in a relationship is that each person protects the others’ solitude. He doesn’t mean being isolated and alone as much as being given the opportunity for time away from the daily routines that distract us, in order to have time and space to ruminate and mull deeper aspects of our lives over. Solitude gives us a chance to germinate new ideas and make connections. In the end each of us is in charge of navigating our own inner ocean, this is the process that allows us to grow more into the person we are, and ultimately to gain wisdom. Slowly we collect the pieces of our soul that want to be seen, heard, and expressed.

We may have a generous partner, or all the time and space to grapple with the deeper questions, but in the end it is us and our desire to deal with the anomalies and paradoxes that leads us to greater wholeness. We have to want it, and bad, because the path is rocky even when everything is going our way. We have to visit the dark places, entering with our own small light to illuminate that which is in front of us. This is where we have to make it happen or it will forever remain undone. No one else can do it for us, no one who can make it all better. Now it may be clearer why so few people take the time to gain greater awareness. But this is the real work of life, and it’s difficult, endlessly complicated, and rife with all we don’t understand. But these opportunities for greater understanding come whether we’re looking for them or not, whether we want them or not. The question is we will welcome them, or ignore them.

I will tell you the payoff is utterly indescribable. To become a richer version of ourselves, to stare our fears down, to come into the holy place of being the truth of who we are with all our battle scars to remind us and deepen our appreciation for life, is no little gift.

It’s the everything we have been looking for in all the wrong places.

kb