In the traditional culture of China, there is one famous saying that: if God would like to make a person great, he would let him experience a lot of difficulties, both psychological and physical. From this we can see that, no one could be great or wise without exposures to adversity or failure. One must gain the wisdom of living from those hard times. Therefore, living affluent lives will help people develop wisdom.
However, in which way it can help people gain wisdom? How can people living affluent lives develop wisdom? Since wisdom consists of expert knowledge and the regulation of emotion, it can be explained from two perspectives: adversity or failure can help people enhance our knowledge and strengthen our ability to control our emotion, hence, develop our wisdom.
First, experiencing failures and difficulties could help us gain knowledge. Let us see a famous example: to invent long lasting light bulb, Thomas Edison experienced a lot of failures. However, just because of these failures, he learned the knowledge and found the right way which led him to success eventually. In reality, people are often ‘afraid’ of failures. We always imagine that we can be successful directly without any difficulties and failures. Nonetheless, no one can make it. Without experiencing the failures, how could we know what is right, what is wrong? Actually, failure itself is a kind of knowledge, and how to treat it is a kind of wisdom. We all know that, failure is the mother of success. Thanks to those difficulties, we could find our shortage, find the mistakes, therefore, find the solutions; thanks to those failures, we know that we need to learn more and in which part we should improve ourselves, so that we could understand truth better, see those complex theories clearer and moreover, understand ourselves better. It guides us a way of studying, at the same time, inspire us to gain more knowledge. Hence, adversities or failures are not ‘horrible dreams’ we would like to forget, but the way life teaches us, the way we can enhance our knowledge, develop our wisdom, which we should remember.
Second, failures and difficulties will not only help us enhance our knowledge, but also help us control our emotions better.
As Karen Parker and her colleagues at Stanford showed from their studies that, exposure to adversity can “enhance the development of brain systems that regulate emotional, neuroendocrine and cognitive control.” (Hall, 2007). This is a scientific way to explain how failures or hard experience can help us. In addition, we can also find evidence from our lives to prove this. We would like to say children are like the flowers in the ‘Green house’. This is because they do not experience a lot, do not learn from failures and do not know how to control themselves. Therefore, they are weak, and you can never say a child is wise. When we are experiencing a hard time in our lives, we may feel bad, helpless and depress. We have no confidence about our future. However, if we can overcome such a period of time, we would develop ourselves. Because we experience more, we will understand more. People can only cope with those negative feelings after they experienced them. Just like Vivian Clayton’s father, only after experienced so many difficulties, he could sit next to his frail mother and celebrate their survival, even though there were still bombs down, with a cup of tea—the ‘tea’ only belongs to wise people (Hall, 2007).
Just like if you want to get gold, you have to heat it; if you want to find the truth, you have to face failure; if you want to treat life calmly, you have to experience adversity. Because this is the way we can fain ourselves, this is the way we can develop wisdom in our lives.
Reference:Hall, S.S. (2007, May 8). Wisdom comes with age? Not true. The Straits Times
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