Scribed In Light

There is something almost comical about reaching a certain age and realizing the older generation was not, in fact, trying to ruin our fun.

They were trying to shorten our suffering.

And yet there we were, giving them the same polite little nod every younger generation has given wisdom since the beginning of time:

“Yeah, yeah. I hear you.”

Until life quietly handed us the very experiences they had been trying to prepare us for all along.

I have laughed recently thinking about how much wisdom surrounded me when I was younger and how little of it I truly absorbed.

Oh, I heard it.

At family dinners.
Across coffee tables.
On porch swings.
In grocery store aisles.
In passing conversations that felt ordinary at the time.

Wisdom about things I would not fully understand until much later in life — the kinds of truths that seem simple until life personally hands them to you.

• Relationships and People
• Time
• Money and work
• Health
• Parenthood & Family
• Integrity and Morals
• Pride and Humility
• Spiritual and Emotional Wisdom

Quiet observations about people and patterns I was too inexperienced to recognize yet.

Somewhere deep down, I think many of us assumed wisdom belonged to “older people problems.”

You know the category:

“We walked uphill both ways to, and from, school…and in hip-deep snow.”
“Gas used to cost us a nickel.”
“Kids these days don’t know how good they have it.”

So we brushed parts of it aside.

Not because we were insolent.

But because youth has a funny way of mistaking experience for exaggeration.

The older I get, though, the more I realize they were never trying to lecture us. They were trying to hand us a map.

Not a flawless one.
Not a painless one.
Just one drawn by people who had already fallen into holes they hoped we might avoid…and honestly, I think that was the disconnect for me personally.

Most wisdom arrived as instruction before I was emotionally mature enough to understand the cost behind it.

I understood the words.

I did not yet understand the layers of experience within them.

There is a difference between hearing someone warn you about fire…and sitting beside them long enough to smell the smoke that still lingers in their lungs while they tell you how they survived it.

That kind of understanding settles differently.

Not because it is louder, but perhaps because it is more human.

I think younger people need more of that.

Not polished self-help slogans.
Not performances from mountaintops.
Not people pretending they have mastered life.

I think they need honesty from the trenches.

The kind that says:

“I made this mistake too.”
“This cost me more than I expected.”
“I ignored this warning once myself.”

Because life is messy.
People are messy.
We are messy.

Sometimes helping people is less about standing above them with answers and more about climbing down into the trench beside them, scooping through the manure together, and gently reminding them there is probably a pony in here somewhere. Let me help you find it.

In my opinion, the people with the most valuable wisdom are simply the ones willing to speak honestly about where they bled.

The older I get, the more I wish I had spent less time assuming I already understood life and more time sitting quietly beside people who had already survived parts of it.

Taking notes.

Real notes.

The kind you carry into relationships.
Into marriage.
Into parenthood.
Into grief.
Into survival.
Into aging.

If I could go back and tell my younger self anything, it would probably be this:

Sit with your elders while you still can.

Ask questions.

Listen longer.

Pay attention to the patterns they are trying to save you from.

Learn from scars you do not personally need to earn.

Because one day you wake up nearly sixty years old yourself, watching younger people stumble into some of the same heartbreaks you once survived, suddenly realizing you are now the one trying to hand out the map.

Sometimes wisdom does not arrive while we are being warned.

Sometimes it arrives years later, standing quietly in the middle of consequences, hindsight, healing, and hard-earned understanding.

Somewhere between the trenches and the pony…you finally begin to understand. We are all still learning the map as we go.

—

Love, hugs, and grace,

Tina N. Campbell
Scribed in Light

“Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.” — Vernon Law

“Listen to counsel and receive instruction, that you may be wise in your latter days.” — Proverbs 19:20