I have twenty-five years of experience, but I would hesitate to call myself wise.
I may be knowledgeable. I may have become skilled at a few things.
But wisdom is something else.
I have spent years in the corporate world and years trying to build businesses. I have experienced success, failure, hope, disappointment, confidence, and uncertainty.
I have lived through many of the days and nights that entrepreneurs know well. Yet I failed more than once. Experience, I realized, does not automatically become wisdom.
I have been a doer for most of my life. I have been action-oriented. I built, created and solved problems. I chased difficult goals.
Without doers, very little would ever be achieved.
But doers also live very close to outcomes. Success creates excitement. Victory strengthens confidence. Loss invites doubt.
Loss creates doubt.
A doer’s emotional life often rises and falls with results.
For many years, that was my life. The more attached I became to winning, the more every defeat disturbed my ability to think clearly. I had experience. But I did not yet have perspective.
Over time, I met people whom I quietly considered wise. They were not always the most experienced. Nor were they always the most successful.
But they possessed something I had not yet developed. Their minds remained steady.
Success did not inflate them. Failure did not break them.
They observed Reality without allowing every result to disturb their judgment.
Much later, I came across a verse in the Bhagavad Gita that explained this better than I ever could.
दुःखेष्वनुद्विग्नमनाः सुखेषु विगतस्पृहः ।
वीतरागभयक्रोधः स्थितधीर्मुनिरुच्यते ॥
(Duḥkheṣvanudvignamanāḥ sukheṣu vigataspṛhaḥ |
Vītarāgabhayacrodhaḥ sthitadhīrmunirucyate ||)
“One whose mind remains undisturbed amidst misery, who does not crave for pleasure, and who is free from attachment, fear, and anger, is called a sage of steady wisdom.”
Reading this verse, I began to understand something.
Experience comes from repeated action. Wisdom comes from repeated observation.
Experience accumulates events. Wisdom extracts understanding from those events.
A person may repeat the same mistake for twenty years and accumulate experience without becoming wise.
Another may observe a single failure deeply enough to change forever.
Looking back, Arjuna was already one of the greatest warriors of his time. He did not lack experience. He lacked clarity. His mind had become disturbed by the consequences of action.
Krishna did not teach him how to fight. He taught him how to see.
Only much later did I begin asking a different question.
What if my experiences were not preparing me to become the winner?
Today, I no longer feel compelled to prove that I have succeeded. I feel responsible for sharing what repeated contact with Reality has taught me.
Perhaps that is the difference.
Experience teaches us what happened. Wisdom understands why it happened.
And once understanding is shared, our failures begin serving a purpose beyond ourselves.
– Kartikeya
Inquiry in Silence. Yoga in Practice.
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