Alexa Suess

“The word “wisdom” comes from the Old English words wis (knowledge, learning) and doom (judgment). Perhaps ill people do, in a sense, become wise through encountering doom, and as a result they become new versions of themselves, having made it through some of the hazards of the course, experiencing what the poet John Ashbery calls “the charity of the hard moments.” Those encounters perhaps allow us to see ourselves—and our mortal condition—more clearly. But it would be false not to observe that this knowledge is born of loss, of resignation to a condition that forces us to give up on aspects of ourselves we had hoped we might develop. Wisdom, in this understanding, is knowledge coupled with the wound that comes from encountering doom.”
― Meghan O'Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness