Youth Does Not Need To Lack Wisdom

Finland’s new prime minister, Santa Marin, is just 34 years of age. Is this too young for a leader. My answer is ‘No’ of course not. Wisdom does not come with age it comes with psychological and spiritual maturity.

This touches a point that is often controversial. It is to do with life and what happens after you die. If life is a one off event then the issues of success and failure, happiness and sadness, maturity and immaturity are limited to this lifetime. If life is continuous then issues of maturity may be more to do with the amount of lifetimes someone has experienced rather than the amount of years they have been alive in this one. People will often describe another person as an ‘old soul’, even if they are a baby. I have met eleven year olds that I would describe as mature adults and sixty five year olds that I would describe as immature children.

Putting the question of reincarnation to one side we can look at the individual as maturing in three ways. These are physical, as our bodies grow, mature and finally age. There is the cognitive functions that as they grow develop our ability to reason and make sense of things. When the cognitive mind matures we see the beginnings of wisdom. Then, as they age we see forgetfulness and eventually dementia. With emotional immaturity we see the egotistical narcissistic behaviours of the demanding child. As they grow and mature people become a caring empathic, insightful and sensitive adult.

That would all be fine but we see some people who have old bodies even when they are children and some old people who maintain a young supple body well into old age. We see the people who have no power of reasoning at any age and see everything emotionally and are completely unable to rationalise. These people are unable to take responsibility for who they are, how they got like it or what they will do from here on. We also see the adults who have never gone beyond their narcissistic self centred need to be recognised as a special individual and believe that the world should revolve around them.

It can be hard when we see a grown person who is physically mature, who has a seemingly good reasonable mind but at the same time acts like a spoilt child. Names like, Johnson, Farage, Corbyn and Trump et al come to mind at this point. As I observe these personalities exercising extreme power over defenceless innocent people using the minds of children I fear for the future of humanity. Over all I realise that maturity has nothing to do with physical age and that maturity and wisdom go together as opposed to the immaturity and knowledge that I see all around me.

For us all the easiest path to wisdom is through mindfulness, self reflection and inner observation. Wisdom requires insight. If we lack insight we cannot develop wisdom. Mindfulness allows to develop insight.

Take care and be happy.

Sean x

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  1. […] Sean has written a blog post to accompany this episode – read it here […]

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