The Price of Wisdom
“Wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for Youth.” Ezra Koenig
When I first heard this lyric from the Koenig’s band, Vampire Weekend, it gave me great pause, and I wanted immediately to wrestle with it in my brain.
In order to dissect this lyric, I think it’s important to understand what kind of wisdom Koenig is talking about. Most dictionaries would say that wisdom is an intricate understanding of something and they would be right. However, I believe Koenig is talking about the sort of wisdom that comes from experience and that can’t be taught. As the idiom goes “experience is the mother of wisdom.”
Koenig’s lyric suggests that youth because of a lack of experience are not as wise as adults, which is completely valid. There are those kids who are known for being “wise beyond their years” but those are the exception, not the norm.
Gaining wisdom is not all roses and rainbows. There may be a lot of joy that paves the road towards wisdom, but the road is also drenched in blood and tears. Koenig would want us to believe that youth is better than wisdom because it is free from these painful experiences that accumulate to form wisdom. And pain hardens people. It makes them different. It veers them from the path and takes them on a road they never intended to be on.
I can relate to this experience of pain in regards to my relationship with God. At first, in high school, I was exuberant and ready to follow the call of God, and I thought I was for awhile. I avoided all the parties and tough questions and wore all the slogans that branded me a Christian.
I remember even carrying my bible around school with me and once a girl asked if I was a Mormon.
Yet, there came a period of extreme pain in my relationship with God. I felt separated from his/her presence, which I thought I felt in high school, and experienced a dryness that I couldn’t explain. Everything just seemed dry; reading the bible, praying, listening to worship music – they all were motions that became robotic for me over time.
This pain altered the way I viewed God and challenged my beliefs. I at first blamed myself for being so damn sinful (since sin is believed in Christianity to separate you from God), but after awhile I began to question this concept of sin and was reading stuff that painted a different picture of God than the one I had originally received.
This God was about two commandments: Loving Him and your neighbor. And He often materialized in my neighbors the more I became sensitive to it.
My path was changed by pain and I gained wisdom about who God is and the reality of the world as I believe it is, but it was painful. It was painful enough that I’d rather stay in youthful delirium than go through the pain necessary to gain the wisdom.
Because of the experiences I’ve had with doubt and God, it has made me more open to experiencing God in people and less open to experiencing God alone. Maybe this is a form of codependence and I don’t know it. I definitely experience God when I write and when I read something insightful.
For the most part my relationship with God has changed. No longer do I look at scripture as the final word or the only word, but as words among many and I cherish the words of everyone. Yet, there are moments that I sincerely miss my old-school belief in God and the innocence of it all.
And so, I can agree with Ezra Koenig and say: I’d trade wisdom for youth any day.
divinedirtclod23 