Wisdom Doesn’t Care Where It Comes From

When I was growing up, I don’t remember anybody sitting me down and giving me profound advice about how to live my life.

I’ve joked over the years that about the only thing my father ever taught me was how to catch a ball. He was a sportsman. He played professional football and semi-pro basketball, so catching a ball was something he knew something about.

I’m not beating up on my father. That’s not the point.

The point is that most of the lessons that shaped my life didn’t come from my father, a teacher, a professor or some great philosopher. Most of them came from living. Some came from people I met along the way. Some came from the street.

Learning from Past Mistakes

And quite a few came from making mistakes.

I’ve had mistakes named after me.

That’s what I tell people, anyway. I’ve made some big enough that if somebody else did the same thing, you could look at it and say, “That’s a Bruce right there.”

At 83, I can laugh about some of them.

Others aren’t quite as funny.

But I’ve learned something about mistakes. They’re yours. You own them, learn whatever you can from them and move on.

You can’t go back and change them. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening.

So why carry them forever?

Sometimes I think we ought to treat our old mistakes like luggage. Carry the suitcase long enough to understand what’s inside it. Then take the damn thing to UPS, ship it somewhere and quit dragging it behind you.

Maybe that’s one of the privileges of getting older.

We begin to recognize wisdom when we hear it.

Recently I’ve been spending some time with the words and outlook of a man whose life probably wouldn’t cause most people to immediately describe him as a philosopher.

I’m not going to tell you who he is just yet. I’d rather you consider the ideas first.

Do What Feels Right to You

How much of our lives do we spend worrying about what somebody else thinks?

When we’re young, approval can seem terribly important. We want our parents to approve. Our friends. Our employers. Our husbands or wives. Sometimes even people we don’t particularly like.

Then you get older and something changes.

You begin to understand that this is your life.

Doing what feels right doesn’t mean ignoring everybody else or hurting people to get your way. It means learning to trust yourself.

At some point, you have to stop asking the entire world for permission to be you.

Don’t Be Afraid to Fall Flat on Your Face

I’ve done that a few times. Probably more than a few. But some of the best things in my life came because I was willing to try something without knowing exactly how it would turn out.

Failure isn’t always proof that you took the wrong road. Sometimes failure shows you a road you didn’t know existed.

The important thing is getting back up.

Friendship Is a Diminishing of Distance Between Two People

Think about that for a moment.

When we’re first getting to know somebody, there’s distance between us. We protect ourselves. We don’t tell them everything. They don’t know all our faults, and we don’t know theirs.

Then, if we’re lucky, something happens over the years.

That distance gets smaller.

Eventually there are people in our lives with whom we don’t have to pretend anymore. They know the good parts and the bad parts. They know where the bodies are buried, figuratively speaking, and they stick around anyway.

Maybe that’s what a lifelong friendship really is: two people slowly removing the distance between them.

Other People’s Opinions Matter Less as You Get Older

This may be one of aging’s better gifts.

I’m not suggesting we stop listening to people. At 83, I still learn things every day. But there is a difference between listening to somebody and allowing that person to decide who you should be.

I didn’t completely understand who I was when I was younger. I’m not sure many of us did.

Age doesn’t necessarily give us all the answers. Maybe it just makes us less afraid of our own answers.

Don’t Let Anybody Tell You You’re Too Old to Do What You Love

This one means something to me.

Getting older is real. Our bodies remind us of it whether we want them to or not.

But being older and being finished are two very different things.

If something gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning, create something, learn something, help somebody, make music, plant tomatoes, write a story or simply laugh, why would you stop because somebody thinks you’ve reached the age when you’re supposed to?

I don’t know what that age is.

I hope I never find out.

You Can’t Control Everything, but You Can Control How You Show Up

Life is going to hand you things you didn’t order.

Loss. Disappointment. Illness. Money problems. Broken relationships. Plans that didn’t work.

We don’t get a vote on all of it. But we still get a vote on what happens next.

We can quit. We can become bitter. Or we can look around and try to find another road.

That doesn’t mean pretending everything is wonderful.

It means recognizing the difference between what we can change and what we can’t – and not wasting the rest of our lives fighting yesterday.

Sometimes the Road Changes Underneath You

I used to think persistence meant deciding where you were going and refusing to stop until you got there.

I’m not so sure anymore.

Sometimes persistence means staying in the game long enough to discover that where you thought you were going isn’t where you belong at all.

Some of the directions my life took weren’t planned. Some came from good choices. Some came from bad ones. But they’ve added up to a full life.

And I wouldn’t want to erase the whole journey just because I wish I’d taken a different turn here and there.

It’s Not Just How Long You Live. It’s How Well You Live – and the Love You Leave Behind

Eventually, the arithmetic becomes pretty simple.

None of us gets forever.

At some point, the question isn’t how many years we managed to accumulate. It’s what we did with them.

Who did we love?

Who loved us?

Did somebody’s life become a little better because we were here?

And when we’re gone, what part of us remains in the people who knew us?

Maybe that’s a better measurement of a life than the number of candles on the cake.

So who is this philosopher I’ve been talking about?

Keith Richards

Yes, that Keith Richards.

The guitar player from the Rolling Stones.

A man most people associate with rock and roll, guitars, cigarettes, excess, survival and somehow still being onstage after more than 60 years.

These eight reflections are my own take on themes I find in his outlook on life, not eight verbatim quotations from him.

Keith has also been described by his bandmate Ronnie Wood as an extraordinarily well-read man. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that someone who has spent a lifetime reading, traveling, creating, succeeding, failing, surviving and observing people might have learned a few things along the way.

But here’s what interests me most.

If you agreed with any of these thoughts before I told you his name, why should knowing his name change them?

Wisdom doesn’t belong exclusively to professors, philosophers, ministers, authors or people with letters behind their names.

Sometimes it comes from the street.

Sometimes it comes from somebody sitting beside you.

Sometimes it comes from your own mistakes.

And apparently, sometimes it comes from a guitar player in the Rolling Stones.

Don’t Judge the Package Too Quickly

If somebody says something that makes you stop and look inside yourself, take whatever truth you find in it and make it your own.

And while you’re looking inside yourself, don’t spend too much time judging the person you find there.

You’ve made mistakes.

So have I.

Swallow hard if you have to. Learn from them. Forgive yourself.

Then take that old suitcase you’ve been dragging around, send it somewhere, and get on with your life.

You’ve still got some living to do.

And wisdom is wisdom, no matter where you find it.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Where have you gotten wisdom from in your life? What’s the most unusual piece of wisdom you hold and where did you learn it from?