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On The Meaning Of Wisdom

What is the meaning of the word 'Wisdom'?



Recently my nine (almost ten) year old sister asked me what is the meaning of the word ‘wisdom’?
It took me sometime to figure out what meaning of wisdom would make sense to a fourth-grader. I mean, I knew the meaning all right, but somehow found it a little difficult to explain.
Google says, the word ‘wisdom’ means the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise. And wise means having or showing experience, knowledge and good judgement.
This was okay but somehow felt difficult for a child to understand.
I tried to simplify it in my way. I told her that it is a kind of knowledge that one gains from experiences. I simplified it further by saying that you grow wiser with time and you gain wisdom towards a particular thing or happening which you experienced. A person cannot be called wise by his intelligence only. It requires experience to become wise.
I also made sure to check what the glossary of her English textbook had to say wherein it was given that a person who has wisdom is someone with knowledge, who understands people and is always fair and correct in his thinking.
I broke this definition into three parts:
A person who has wisdom is:
1.       Someone with knowledge: someone who not only has intelligence but has been a witness to a number of happenings and incidents, which all sum up to his experiences, has this familiarity with the way things usually go.
2.       Who understands people: Someone who knows how people generally tend to react in a particular situation. They assume it because they have seen the same happening with a large number of people given in a same or similar situation.
3.       Who is always fair and correct in his thinking: someone who has experienced similar situations with a number of people and having good judgement skills, knows how people react and is always right about it.
Citing examples, I tried to clear it to her. I said that things keep happening around us all the time. And while having to go through certain situations a number of times, we can judge how things usually work out. I am not exactly sure if we can call this wise. But come on, when we think of wisdom, we always end up explaining the way the mind of an old and experienced person would work. It isn’t exactly wrong but it isn’t only old people who are wise.
I never thought explaining a word could be so difficult. But at the end, when I asked her what the meaning of wisdom is, she did tell me it is knowledge and judgement skills gained from experiences over time.

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