:)  Some older folks are just further down the wrong road.

Older folks tend to panic less. There is wisdom in not panicking.

Having a rough early life correlates with wisdom:

Many of the wisest people had pretty awful childhoods.

Via Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience:

Aristotle had a speech impediment and was orphaned at an early age; Moses stuttered. Socrates was famously ugly. Pericles had a head so narrow and congenitally misshapen that Plutarch describeed it as a “deformity” and recounted that the comic poets of Athens took malicious glee in calling him “schinocephalos,” or “squill-head.” Gandhi lamented his frail boyhood body and a shyness so profound that other children laughed at his reticence. Confucius’s father died when he was three, and Abraham Lincoln’s mother died when he was nine. Siddhartha Gautamas mother died when he was seven days old, and even as a young adult, the future Buddha was virtually imprisoned by his own father, who was alarmed by a prophecy that his son would abandon both family and wealth in search of spiritual awakening.

Across the board, researchers have noticed a connection between wisdom and early adversity in life.

Via Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience:

…some research has located the roots of wisdom as early as adolescence or early adulthood… wisdom often grew out of an exposure to adversity early in life. Many participants in the Berlin Aging Study who rated high on wisdom testing, according to coauthor Jacqui Smith, had lived through some of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous events as children and young adults…

Read more: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/07/true-wisdom/

The part that seemed to be key to me was the following:

True wisdom involves feelings

Knowledge is merely collected information. whereas emotional intelligence is a key part of wisdom.

Via Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience:

In his valedictory work on wisdom, Baltes attributed the acquisition of wisdom to a variety of factors—general intelligence and education, early exposure to meaningful mentors, cultural influences, and the lifelong accumulation of experience, which is the centerpiece of developmental psychology. But he, too, acknowledged the central importance of emotional intelligence, noting that “there is good reason to assume that people capable of effectively regulating emotional states associated with dilemmas of life by cognitive rather than affective-dysfunctional modes might have a better chance of being considered wise or scoring high on wisdom tasks.” 

Read more: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/07/true-wisdom/#ixzz2ZqJsYukb

That bold-face line is a mouthful.

So wisdom is managing one's emotional states effectively?

Yes, it is quite a mouthful. And yes, it seems that wisdom is associated with effectively managing your emotional states, especially when facing dilemmas and hardships.