The Wisdom Of Age

I must have been ten years old when I started thinking.  I'm sure that I also thought before then but it was always feeling, sense or need based.  One day when I was walking to school--I was in the fourth grade then--it was as though suddenly I began to speak but in my mind, without using my voice.  By this time I was spending a lot of time alone.  We had recently moved to a new house and I for some reason was not able to make friends with other kids in the neighbourhood.  In the old house I was always with someone, it seemed.  With my closer friends, my brother, with other kids in the neighbourhood.  I seldom had to play alone though sometimes I did. 
     This was for me a difficult and painful transition.  My brother and I finally had our own rooms, which for him, at thirteen, was a huge boon because now he could close the door and masturbate in peace, which I sometimes wonder is why he really did clamour for having a room of his own.  And why my dad was so in favour of it.  I did hope this would mean getting hit and kicked less by him (nope, he just burst into my room and would pummel me right there, as did my mother, and my father, well, he was even worse!) and thinking of this made me all for it as well.
     I was reading a lot.  Especially the encyclopedia.  When we moved to the new house within two weeks Dad, on Mom's insistence (he otherwise wouldn't have bothered) bought us a current (1966 was the year) set of World Book Encyclopedias.  I was hooked.  I wanted to know...everything.  I still do.  Yes, I was one of those nerdy kids who didn't have friends and read the encyclopedia all day.  And I thought.  Constantly, I thought.
     I still think, well, I hope I do.  But it no longer is a detached voice in my head that talks like an android robot.  I no longer feel a need to detach myself in order to cope with abuse and stress and my emotions and thoughts seem to have more or less made peace with each other. 
     When I became a teenage Jesus Freak it was to put it mildly a very feeling experience.  My mind took a back seat as I was released into the joy and love of the Lord.  Mainstream church people are often threated by emotion and often like to deride and sneer at the emotional worship of charismatic and Pentecostal Christians.  If only they knew what they're missing.  If only they would admit how frightened they are by this.  It's easy for me to say because my Christian journey started with the Jesus' People and it was very emotional and very joyous.  As I mentioned already, I did check my brain at the door for a while, and that's where it belonged, at the time anyway.
     In my thirty plus years in the Anglican Church I have brought my brain out of mothballs, but not at the expense of my feelings.  Long ago I told them to kiss and make up and learn how to work together and play nice, and they do.  Whenever I am getting too cold and analytical something will creep in to thaw my heart of ice and suddenly something beautiful or horribly sad has struck me and I'm in tears, or emotional ecstasy.  Or I will be going through everything like a happy thoughtless idiot, a brainless, reacting fool and after one owie too many I have to stop, distance myself and let the brain take over for a while.  But usually they work now in harmony.
     Is this the wisdom of age?