Beyond My Wisdom
Prompt from my weekly writing group.

Watercolor painting showing freshness.

Dusk along the Puna coast. Watercolor, 2017

What is beyond my wisdom?

If something is beyond our wisdom, can we actually comprehend it? Certainly beyond my knowledge I can understand. But wisdom?

What is wisdom after all?

Does wisdom equal the sum of our knowledge? No, not really but I think wisdom encompasses that.

Wisdom is one’s intuition, at least in part. We intuit things often, yet we don’t always act on our intuition.

Wisdom is more like… knowing when a painting is done.

Knowing when a painting is done is a learned skill based on ample experience, plus a big dose of inner knowing.

Kids know when their paintings are done. They finish and shout out in glee, “Look at what I did!”

Adults artists rarely know when to stop. How often do we ask another’s advice “Do you think it’s finished yet?”

How can we, the creator not know?

We paint and the love of painting exceeds the time when the painting is actually complete. When we overwork a painting we lose the initial freshness. We arrive at the point of “Ugh!”, long after the initial “Ahh!”

Sadly it is only in hindsight when we know the artwork has been pushed too far. Though with insight, this experience adds to the sum of our wisdom.

My wish is to conjure the state of Beyond my Wisdom. Go one step further than knowledge and three steps back into childhood innocence.
Abbie Rabinowitz ~ May, 2021.