Wisdom

I've been on this saga since the beginning of the year, its a journey into my inevitable aging. I tried making a list of all the things I notice about aging and everything on my list was negative. I don't like to focus on negative so I decided that negativity was causing me to be blocked in my thoughts and I need to find some positives. I thought a long time and finally I discussed this with someone. While not as old as I am, she is still no spring chicken either, so she can understand where I am coming from.
Her answer to me was quick and I knew she had thought about this a lot too. She said the main positive to aging is WISDOM. I find that to be 100% true. You can't live a long time without learning a whole lot. Just the experiences of a lifetime teach and teach and teach again. Sometimes we make the same mistakes over and over again until we learn what is causing them and have the WISDOM to stop the madness. Besides the experiences of failure and redoing, we have experiences of successes when we just plain figure something out and it works.
Then there is the WISDOM we gain when we purposely set out to learn something new. And you read books about other people's experiences. So each year you live, WISDOM grows and new things happen and you just store more and more.
And the WISDOM you gain in a million conversations with a thousand different people in the many years. I can't help but wonder how many conversations I have had in my lifetime. From each one, some WISDOM is imparted to my brain as I view how other people think and receive information.
I don't feel "smart" about it. Its just there. I can pull up answers to many things without even knowing when and how it became part of me. Sometimes I try to recall when that bit of information because part of my being, and most of the time I don't know. I hope I'm WISE enough to know I don't have to pursue the why's, just accept it.