bigger than we thought

Where does wisdom come from? It’s not just from our thinking, because our thinking can be wrong sometimes. It’s not just from our feelings and impulses, because those can also lead us into trouble. Some people like to talk about “being in the moment” or “following your gut,” and I always wonder if that kind of thinking is just an excuse for throwing off self-restraint.

Children throw off restraint all the time, and sometimes that seems very enviable. But I don’t think it makes them wise, except in fleeting ways. Teenagers are notorious for unwise decisions—but is that a different interpretation of wisdom? I think wisdom is not the same as being safe and calculating.

To find wisdom, we almost have to step outside ourselves, meaning we have to transcend our limitations. (After all, we can’t really step outside ourselves, because if we did, then our selves would be there to greet us.) Wisdom is discovering that we are much bigger than we thought before.

When I think about the qualities that I admire or want to have, I usually think of another person who exemplifies them to me. Knowing that person makes the quality alive and real. In fact, everything I imagine possible for a human being to experience comes from knowing someone (or at least about someone) who experienced it.

For example, Greg Mortensen is a Himalayan climber who found himself stranded in a Pakistani village and promised to build a school there. With extraordinary perseverance, he managed to establish not just one school, but dozens of them throughout a rural tribal area. If he could do that in northern Pakistan, I reflected, why couldn’t I create schools here? Schools which answer the deeper needs of young people. Schools that teach wisdom.

I think wisdom is personal. I remember the personal qualities of every teacher that I had. Knowledge starts with people. The great discoveries of science and the great moments of history are entwined with the lives of the people who made them. This is true of any field; it surprised me once to realize that geometry was invented by someone.The universe is personal; it is imaginative. Many indigenous cultures know this; they don’t try to divorce themselves from the living and changing nature in which we all live. Now that the particle physicists and the cellular biologists are beginning to talk the same way, I’m hoping more people will listen.

Tags: teachers, wisdom