Wisdom: when The Obvious Becomes Apparent.
Wisdom is defined in Webster's dictionary as the power of judging the most sound course of action, based on knowledge, experience, understanding, etc: good judgment; discretion; sagacity.
My feeling is that wisdom can be viewed as: When the "obvious becomes apparent" to us; nothing more, nothing less. It is a view of the world or a particular situation that allows us to incisively locate the essential and sometimes fundamental elements of any human experience. The superfluous issues obscuring the obvious consequences of an important decision must be removed in order for the solution to become apparent to us.
Philosopher William James, in an "other-side-of-the-coin" description, said it a little differently: "Wisdom is learning what to overlook."
The irony of wisdom is that we must experience the unnecessary and superfluous in order to eliminate them, and then return to the essentials. While musing about experience, I like the definition of intuition as "the vapors of past experiences." The expression "conventional wisdom" can be interpreted as referring to a consensus - the choice of proven past successful (or perhaps, obsessive) collective strategies of the group or culture, and its failures, either emphasized or conspicuously absent. "Conventional wisdom" is based on what worked in the past and what didn't.
How many times have we heard or said: "That is such a simple solution, why didn't we think of that?" The fact of the matter is, the obvious solution wasn't apparent to us. This view of wisdom leans heavily on the relationship of wisdom and experience (also education - neatly viewed as "organized experience"), which implies that wisdom should increase with age.
