If It Isn't Wisdom It Must Be Folly
by
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Chapter 1. An Odyssey of Discovery
I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance... there is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance... Know thyself.
--Socrates, 469-399 BC
What follows is an account of my remarkable eighteen-year journey that led me to discover the many disguises of folly. I learned these the hard way, that is, by entertaining foolish ideas and making foolish mistakes. In retrospect, I couldn’t believe that I had been so blind. In the immortal words of Shakespeare, “The fool doth think himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Finding my way was not easy but coming home older and wiser made it well worth the trip. It was the many obstacles that folly threw in my path that caused my journey to become an odyssey.
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At the age of fifty-seven I found myself looking back at my life. I had married and raised two wonderful children who were busy raising their children. I was still happily married, which I thought was an accomplishment of sorts when considering the odds in this day and age, but in spite of all my blessings I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was either missing or something was wrong.
Caught up in my reverie, I was reminded of my father and his last words. Fading quickly from the cancer that had invaded his body eight months earlier, he told me something so profound that I thought I would never forget either the moment or his words. “I blinked my eyes,” he said, “and it was all over.” Evidently he too had been looking back into his past, and it was too late to do anything about it. I was thirty--two years old at the time, and he was sixty. I vowed then and there that I would never let that happen to me.
As my life had already slipped by as if but a moment in time, I was shocked to find out that I had completely forgotten my vow. Had his words come back to haunt me? Since I still had time to change my ways, or as they say, “find myself,” I took it as a good omen. I reasoned that I had been given a chance to start all over again.
How would I live out my remaining precious days? There had to be more to life than my daily routine of household chores and filling in my spare time playing golf and bridge and reading popular novels. My new outlook on life had caused me to see these pastimes as being amusing but not highly fulfilling.
As if awakening from a long sleep, I became interested in current events. Where before I had been an ostrich with my head in the sand, flipping past the news on TV, I found myself not just paying attention, but becoming highly absorbed. What I saw was that things were not going well. Watching talk shows,
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About the Book
Wisdom: Understanding what is right, true, and lasting; good judgment.
-Webster’s II New University Dictionary
By following along as the author relates her insightful discoveries, we become privy to the many disguises of folly that have served to keep us from “knowing ourselves.” What we especially need to become aware of is our great potential; the promise of the wise is the ecstatic joy of enlightenment.
Humor is defined as the ability to perceive and thus enjoy what is comical. When we are in a reasonable mood we are able to perceive what is humorous about human nature; when we are not, we lose both our sense of humor and our perspective. Consider, for example, the fact that we can be as repulsed by truth as we are by cockroaches.
What is needed to become wise to folly is a clear understanding of what is wrong, what is not true, and what is ludicrous, ridiculous, or absurd and thus comical.
While it is true that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” it has also caused the sword to be taken up. There is no better way to bring about a glorious future and a happy ending to our troubled past than by recognizing folly and laughing it off the stage.
About the Author
Joan Morrone was born in
She describes herself as an ordinary person who happened to have an enlightening experience. At the age of 57, her interest in finding a reasonable explanation for her mind-altering experience led to her spending eighteen-years doing research and writing her book.
While she shows that an enlightening experience is not always lasting and can even become the source of illusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution, she believes that the reason she was able to maintain her ecstatic high was because she had gotten to the root of the problem. When we realize the cause of unhappiness, the cure is assured.