Can We Apply That Wisdom Elsewhere?

When I was a young teacher, I experienced burnout. I reached a point where I was genuinely prepared to walk away from the profession altogether.

In the mid-1970s, burnout wasn’t something we talked about. At least not in my circle. If you were overwhelmed, exhausted, or questioning your choices, the message was simple: deal with it. So, I did. I pushed through, worked my way past the doubts, and stayed in education for another forty-two years.

In that sense, the strategy worked.

But years later, when I developed problems with my knee, I responded very differently. I went to the doctor. I was given medication and exercises. When those helped for a while but weren’t enough, surgery became the next step. The process was practical, structured, and supported.

That contrast has stayed with me.

What if I had treated burnout the way I treated my knee?

What if I had talked to someone who understood the strain I was under? What if I had received guidance, perspective, or simply permission to pause? Would things have turned out differently? Maybe. Maybe not. But I suspect the road might have been less stressful, and the weight I carried might have been lighter.

Physical pain gives us a script. We recognize it as legitimate. We respond to it with action. Emotional and cognitive exhaustion, on the other hand, often gets dismissed as weakness, impatience, or a lack of resilience, especially in earlier generations. So we endure, assuming that persistence is the same thing as wisdom.

Aging gives us something younger versions of ourselves didn’t have: perspective.

With time, we begin to see patterns. We notice how energy ebbs and flows, how commitments accumulate, how relationships can nourish us or drain us, and how expectations, our own and others’, can quietly exhaust us. Self-regulation expands beyond joints and muscles into the wider terrain of life.

Asking for help when you’re overwhelmed isn’t failure. It’s discernment. Knowing when to slow down, when to say no, and when to ask for support is a skill, one we’re often better equipped to learn later in life than earlier.

A friend once said to me, “Do you realize it’s been sixty years since we were twenty? That’s scary.”

I said, “No. It’s been sixty years since we were twenty, and that’s amazing.”

He paused for a moment, thought about it, and then agreed.

That pause matters. It’s the space where wisdom lives. Not in pretending we can still do everything the same way, but in recognizing that experience has given us tools we didn’t have before. If we’re willing to use them, aging becomes less about loss and more about pacing, learning how to keep going without wearing ourselves down.