Wisdom. anyone?

WISDOM is scarce and difficult to acquire.

What is wisdom? Let's say “wisdom” is the fusion of experience and gathered knowledge into core principles that, integrated into our awareness, being and behaviour, help us to live well. Living “well” means living satisfyingly, joyfully, confidently, with integrity and without harming other people or nature. It is about peace, within oneself and with the World. It is a dream, an ideal. 

In youth, we’re called upon to gather ideas in a great rush to make our way in life. Most of those ideas about the World are constructed by others. Some are great and manage to survive the testing times of life; most are, at best, expedient, and they get us through… sort of… with a bit of luck. And some are total rubbish.

They come to us through our parents and peers, our educators and employers, from society, politics, friends, economics, religion… and a lot of them are convincing because, in those particular, close contexts, everyone around us is similarly mistaken.

Along the way, we also pick up glimpses of truth, insights into reality and some genuine wisdom. We almost certainly start seeing flaws in the ways we are living, in what's offered as “common sense” and in “conventional wisdom”.

As we become growingly aware of our necessary selfhood, most of us are likely to be picking up signals that our favourite falsehoods are, in fact, false. To avoid the stress of self-examination and the effort of reworking our accepted ideas and beliefs, we might to decide to cling to them anyway and hope for the best.

Or we might feel more “wisdom” would come in handy. And that leaves us with a couple of ways to become wiser:

1. Seek more insight. This, though, means opening more widely to experience and that carries risks. It means adventuring into new (to us) ideas, fields of interest and personal reflection — and that’s hard work for which we probably have limited time and little energy.

2. Discern and ditch more falsehoods. Though this, too, means taking some risks. Can we get by without some of our deeply embedded falsehoods? What will happen when we pull one familiar prop out from under our cherished sense of who we are… then another, and another? Besides, what is all THAT wrong with us?

Or we can let life continue to simply run on by us… and linger within familiar boundaries. There are dangers here, too. The biggest is the vulnerability of trying to stand still in a changing, inherently dynamic world; our self-image is bound to become less and less tenable unless we let it shift. Placing that shift in the hands of others will leave us, in the end, not knowing who we are, feeling lonely and without “meaning”.

What might be a few “favorite falsehoods”? The list here is necessarily personal but a few I’ve done my best to eject from my own life would include, for example:

• The fallacy that there’s ever “us” and “them”.

• The fallacy that winning a war, a game or a life-contest is something to be celebrated.

• The fallacy that we can pick and choose the people we should treat decently.

• The fallacy that anyone can move on in life without forgiving completely and utterly.

• The fallacy that what I’ve done by simply earning a living hasn’t really ever harmed others.

• The fallacy that some things never change and that some things are reliably predictable.

• The fallacy that someone who’s more needy than me is somehow less deserving.

• The fallacy that hard work, intelligence and education guarantee “success”.

• The fallacy that our responsibilities end at living decently and not making waves.

ANYBODY can seek wisdom… and, for humanity's sake, everybody should. 

Wisdom has very little to do with information, data or blitzing through books… nor with genes or Myers-Briggs profiles. Nor is it necessarily archaic or arcane.

It's not about “knowing” (in the popular modern sense) — or job training — but “meaning”. And it lies around in everyday stuff: the walls we bounce off and the torrents that lift us high. It's a gift, to be sure — but no more special than our other capacities. Denied the ability to fly like a bird, we have to do our flying with our wisdom journey.

Wisdom simply has to do with cultivating an open-ness to experience and that has a lot to do with trust: trusting, for example, that whatever got "me" here today can probably also take me to where I need to be tomorrow. That trust may be misplaced but — even if it is — there's nothing gained by withholding it. As we go, discernment grows and life deepens as it unfolds.

So far, the mystery's okay by me.

To not “let go” into life is a seriously self-debilitating choice… imagine a swallow on a wire thinking “what if that stuff with the wings doesn’t work this time?” and clinging to the wire, waiting for food to come to it until  at last it dies of hunger.  

I'm saddened by the way we “elders” collectively allow the “system” to regiment young people into what’s called “responsibility” when the world — everywhere — is such an exciting, interesting diverse and dynamic place to be.  Young people would be far happier and better off with vision quests than with law and business degrees, or with jobs that eat up their capabilities and give them fretful lives of struggle to keep corporate castles in the air. A bit of irresponsibility can be a marvellous tonic.

We “elders” owe young people more than we give them… and, to be “elders”, we should be helping them to open their eyes and ears and interests and minds, and dissuading them from embarking, passionless, on some glassy-eyed, psychic sleepwalk into student debt, but to follow wherever curiosity and inspiration lead. Knowledge should be as accessible as fresh air and water. God knows, education should at least be free and available to anyone who wants it. And the idea of what counts as “education” needs to include the whole of life. 

Truth and beauty are more important than any career skill. Wisdom is a journey for which all should be allowed, or must claim, space and time. Its pursuit is to the common good.

Learning to see truth and beauty is more important than any career skill…