Resilience, adaptability, wisdom

It's always special fun when a blog post belongs on DreamReweaver ~AND~ older2elder.  Writing it here, will repost it there, because the three qualities I'm writing about - resilience, adaptability, wisdom - are core to an abundant life at any age, under any experience.

Got to thinking about those three nouns while reading (& rereading & rereading & rereading...) The Greatest Salesman in the World.  Scroll I talks about the importance of stepping away from the "handicap of meaningless experience," that the "value of experience is overrated," compares experience to fashion - "an action that proved successful today will be unworkable & impractical tomorrow."

Is experience meaningless, as fleeting & fickle as fashion?  The experience itself - yes.  What the experience teaches us - that lasts forever.  And, unlike the experience itself, is always changing growing expanding. 

Racking up all the credentials in the world doesn't make us the best at doing a task at hand.  That's determined by how we apply what we know.  Countless  brilliant minds earned high flying degrees & garnered accolades of academic excellence, but without the ability to adapt & apply what they've learned to real life situations - without that ability, all their acquired knowledge is just academic because what they learned no longer (or never did) apply.

The best we can hope for as we go through the formal education systems, as younger people go through, is to learn to keep a light hold on what we learned because it is going to change as the world changes, as WE hange.  What we hopefully picked up from all those term papers, tests, theses is how to be resilient, adaptable & apply what we learned along the way. 

Eight years ago, I taught at-risk high school students courses that lacked enough classroom books for each to have his or her own to read from, where there was NO expectation that students would purchase their own textbooks & the supplies necessary to do homework.  My students considered me a very peculiar teacher for how my tests were constructed(the questions were to constructed to educate), that class participation was a key component of their grade, that I gave Bs & As for their questions & comments & tossed a bag of Doritos to someone with a brilliant insight or inquiry.  Sure, I wanted them to learn certain facts, but it stumped them that way more than facts, I strove to teach them how to THINK, adapt, apply.  I hoped to instill some sense of resilience, adaptability, wisdom.

Knowledge itself has no value.  Ditto experience.  Wherever I taught, at BACS or DVHS or creativity workshops, the goal was & is to help others become  alchemists, taking what they know, what they experience, transforming it into something totally different from their original, individual state. 

Looking back, it's clear that my hope, my goal was for my students to gain the tools for being resilient, adaptable, wise.  Because Og Mandino is spot on - what works today might not tomorrow, so be open to seeing what does.

Our challenge, whatever our age, is to combine what we know & what we've experience into qualities that support resilience, adaptability, wisdom, which nurture sound principles, the things that truly guide us. 

Whether we are six or sixty, a tween or ancient, nurturing our sense of resilience & adaptability helps make us wise or just make us effective.  How we approach what we foster determines whether we bend toward good & wisdom or toward something else & unwise - however productive - principles.

Seems to me that what we bring to Life's bounteous table depends less on the schooling we got, the work & life experiences we had, than on being gifted alchemists, transforming all of what crosses our path into something so much more.  We are asked to constantly change so that we can connect with what works best today, even if it might have been a total flub last week.  We are called to release the allure of apparent certainty for a life of risk & reward, of transforming what works today into what is effective tomorrow. 

Resilience, adaptability, wisdom.  Og Mandino talks about a principled life bringing wealth "far beyond my most extravagant dreams until even the golden apples of the Garden of Hesperides will seem no more than my just reward."  To me, those three qualities - resilience, adaptability, wisdom - ARE those very golden apples, treasures beyond imagination that lead us to our truest self, our greatest prosperity.