Silence and Wisdom

 

.The more I live, the more I appreciate the wisdom of the adage "Silence is Wisdom". Silence is foreign to me as I was born to talk, to shoot from the hip, to blabber my day away. But I suppose Ego begins to catch up with me as I'm getting more sensitive and touchy, so I'm filled with feelings of anger and fantasies of vengeance when I find myself a target of vicious slanders or insults. The result is that I am getting acquainted with taciturnity and fully see the stupidity of those who have intemperate speech. The Japanese have a saying that one should count 7 breaths before saying anything nasty. Likewise, the folk wisdom of the Vietnamese suggests that one roll the tongue 7 times before saying anything. The American mothers are known to advise their children to keep their mouths shut if they have nothing nice to say to or about another person. But people think they have a liberty to say unpleasant things about me straight to my face. They say I am cheap, childish or even stupid. They tell me "to fuck off" in a public setting and think they can away with that. Things recently got very interesting when two vertically, financially, and intellectually challenged women self-projected and dissed me in inaccurate and venomous terms after I had let them know that at long last I no longer found their company tolerable. "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned" (William Congreve). I found their behavior predictable and yet amusing. I then learned one profound truth: true love is silence. suffering, and sacrifice as Saul said in his first epistle to the Corinthians. In my salad days, when I was dumped left and right by women, I sulked and was suffused with self-pity and silence, and I turned to philosophy and books for solace; I didn't lash out and issue thunderous denunciations. I suppose I had true love within me. I didn't want to hurt the feelings of those to whom my heart once vibrated. I moved on and learned from my painful experiences and finally recognized Love for what it is: a challenging game full of mysteries, not unlike Life itself. To win at the game of Love, one must have a big heart and a sharp mind to know one's place in the world in order to come to terms with a simple but profound fact: if a person does not love you, the fault lies more in you than in him/her because nobody, unless he/she is a fool, walks away from persons and things of value. So if a guy does not love you, that means he finds you, rightly or wrongly, undesirable and of no use or interest to him. That means you must accept that stark, simple fact and move on with your life. The more you denounce him and call him names, the more you lower yourself in the gutter in his eyes and you confirm to him that you are just a low-class, loud-mouthed, and stupid woman. Silence is Wisdom. 

 

Also, you may contemplate on the following:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

I did that over and over again. And take a close look at me now: a stunning drop-dead gorgeous, sexy, virile man of letters and recovering wealth and allure, at the age of 65. "For me, second adolescence begins at 65", ainsi parlait Wissai.