For your protection, I’m going to kick off this post with a big old…
[NERD ALERT!]
I am in a very “studious mood” these days, and I’m ripe for learning my life lessons with a lot of gusto. So I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts about the Wisdom Traditions* from the ancient writings of the Torah (or the Old Testament, if you prefer). I’m totally eating up each episode on my hikes, and when I get done, I just feel solid and like I’m more balanced inside — which is a good thing since my circumstances still feel a little wobbly most of the time!
Today’s episode was about the warnings in the Wisdom Traditions about being “simple” (or “foolish”) and the value of exercising “prudence” (which is a more layered version of wisdom). Of course, the content of the episode intrigued me very much, but the use of the word prudence made me smile immediately. I already have a very specific relationship with that word, and it’s amazing how handy my memories were while listening to this podcast!
Here’s the backstory:
Right after I graduated from college, I decided I wanted to buy a new car. I’d been driving a 1970 orange Karmann Ghia that my dad hooked me up with for my last couple years of college. But I was growing tired of being hot all the time (no A/C) and smelling like gas fumes (which is a crummy side-feature of an air-cooled engine). It was a fine car, and I do have fond memories of my life as a Karmann Ghia driver, but at that time, I was ready for something way better.
Within weeks of graduating from college, I landed a job as a flight attendant, and before I was even cleared to fly, I had already started plotting how I’d spend my “hard-earned money” on a brand new car. This was the early 90s, and the new Mazda MX6 just came out, and boy did I have my eye on that car! So one afternoon, very reluctantly, my dad went to the local Mazda dealership with me to test drive this super sexy sports car.
I think it was the sunroof that had my nostrils flared and my desire for this car aflutter. It had this mechanism that made it feel like just a slice of the roof was peeling back so the sun could shine in, and that looked so sleek and fancy to me at the time. I know my dad was less impressed, and I have a very clear memory of him saying things like, “An automatic sunroof is just one more thing that could break on you, Sonja,” and “Owning this car feels like a bit more than you can handle right now.”
But when I want something, and my mind is made up…
I can turn into Red Sonja the Sorcerer — especially back then — and I think my dad knew I’d rip him and myself to ribbons before I’d let go of my very firm ideas about that car. The details of the purchase experience are a bit vague for me now, but what I do remember was driving the pearl-white car with the tan-leather interior off the lot — with the sunroof open — and having my very first wave of buyer’s remorse. It might’ve been my dad’s persistent use of the phrase, “being upside down in the car” that caused the first loop-de-loop in my stomach, but as I said, the details are a bit fuzzy.
About a week after buying the car, I got a message on my parents answering machine from the Mazda dealership. It was one of those after-sale-calls about purchasing an extended warranty, and even though the details of the message don’t stick out to me now, something the salesman said did. He said:
“It would be very prudent of you to get the Mazda extended warranty, Ms. Bentley.”
To help me celebrate my new car purchase, my sister had just sent me a mixed tape with a song on it by Siouxsie And The Banshees called Dear Prudence. The instant I pumped that song through the speakers of my new car, and right after I heard that wonky message from the Mazda salesman, I officially named my car.
Her name was Prudence.
Looking back on it now, I honestly can’t get over the tragic irony of the name I gave my very first brand new car because there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING PRUDENT about that car! For starters, I was living in South Florida at the time, and because I was based in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach for my flight attendant job, driving Prudence up and down I-95 was actually costing me more in gas than I was earning on my bottom-of-the-totem-pole, puddle-jumping flights from one of those airports to the Bahamas or Puerto Rico! I had never owned a car with a V-8 engine before, and very quickly, my days as a sweaty, gasy-smelling Karmann Ghia driver were starting to be greatly missed…
Then when you add the potential of car theft on top of that, the “prudent” amount of insurance I had to carry on good old Prudence was staggering! Theft protection wasn’t required, exactly, but the horror stories my fellow flight attendants told me about their long trips ending with the discovery that their cars were stolen or broken into in the employee lot made me feel like I needed to maximize my coverage on the single largest purchase of my entire life!
I think I only had Prudence for about six months before I came crawling back to my dad for his help. There wasn’t a whole lot he could do to help me fix the poor choice I made, and my dad, while he was always helping me out, was never one to buy me out of my problems. The best he could do was go with me to the dealership again, and negotiate a trade-in. I ended up trading Prudence in for a much older Mazda MX3 that no longer had that “new car smell,” lacked a sunroof of any kind, and had hand-crank windows and a dodgy A/C system.
I ended up naming that car, Smelly Shelly — because the salesman’s name was Sheldon, and he blew my dad and me away with his coffee breath.
So as I was listening to this podcast on the Wisdom Tradition of “prudence,” I had this deep and very visceral understanding of the word, yet I was eager to learn more. And, of course, I did. For many years, whenever I thought about my first new car, I spent a lot of time shaming myself for coveting Prudence the way I did. And more often than not, even when I’d talk about this car purchase with Lou, the focus I gave the lesson was on how stubborn I was about getting that car against my dad’s better judgment.
Don’t get me wrong: I still think those are pearls of wisdom for me to string up from that particular life experience. I can still be a very stubborn girl, and it can be very problematic when I decide not to heed the sage advice of the people I trust the most in this world. Plus, I was very literally haunted by being “upside-down” in the purchase of Prudence all the way up until I married Lou — so clearly, it was a life-altering and foolish decision on my part.
But as I dug deeper into the root meaning of the word prudence today, I think now I understand that exercising the virtue of prudence isn’t just about avoiding something tricky or potentially dangerous — which is kind of how I always pictured it. Prudence, it turns out, is more nuanced than that. It’s more like going into something tricky or potentially dangerous with my eyes open and deciding on the best way to move through the experience. And moving through it well comes down to applying all of the wisdom I have with the kind of emotional intelligence I’ve gained from my faith and how it has been tested by my life experiences.
So prudence is not about shaming myself as a deterrent to help me avoid all future problems.
Rather, prudence is about acknowledging the potential for problems, and then charting the wisest path forward.
I was so thankful to gather a few more nuggets of wisdom to take with me in my life these days because honestly, I am very prone to beating myself up over past mistakes I’ve made, and for lacking the ability to keep myself from stepping into risky situations. As cautious as I am in my personality, I also can’t seem to stand the idea of a boring life anymore — and being married to Lou has all but guaranteed a life I simply can’t predict!
But I guess for me, it’s when I contrast prudence with foolishness that I can clearly see the difference between a “simple-minded” and “ignorant” choice versus one that leads with the wisdom of multiple perspectives all adding to the same grand picture. And when that grand picture is so big I can only see it with my faith…
Then my dear prudence seems like the best and most virtuous vehicle I can count on to carry me forward.
…….
