On Being Wise
Photo credit: Fabrice Villard on Unsplash
Let us be the ones who spend our time well;
who live every hour of every day.
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Wisdom is one of the keys to a joyful life that’s perhaps the most egalitarian- none of us is born wise. None of us is naturally wise. For every single person, wisdom is only acquired through the act of living, learning, and choosing to take on the lessons of our experience, failure, and observations.
Wisdom is work. More precisely, it’s a good burden.
To be wise is to be marked by deep understanding, keen discernment, and a capacity for sound judgment. The wise keep time to choose a good course of action before moving ahead.
It is in those moments where we feel we don’t have a choice that we in fact must decide what’s most important.
The most vital role of wisdom is in guiding good decision-making. There’s simply no substitute for the ability to make wise choices- even at the dizzying heights of today’s technology, when it comes to actions on an individual level (you or me, for example), even AI-powered predictive algorithms can’t compare to an experienced human brain. Making wise choices is about taking in knowledge and facts- not simply seeing them and reacting to them- and synergizing them with everything we know about what is right and true.
Wise is not the same as smart. Or vice versa.
To be wise is to be marked by deep understanding, keen discernment, and a capacity for sound judgment. The wise keep time to choose a good course of action before moving ahead.
It is in those moments where we feel we don’t have a choice that we in fact must decide what’s most important.
At many times in our lives, the unavoidable truth will be that changing our situation is necessary; the best, maybe even the only, course of action. In the wise words of poet Anaïs Nin, there comes a time in each of our lives when “the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
The bud is a tender and quiet place. It feels safer inside than facing the crowd of challenges the outer world promises.
But the risks of blooming are worth it.
The rewards of wise, intentional change are innumerable. They may even be the greatest possible wisdom you can cultivate, the greatest gift you can give yourself and those around you.
The most joyful life is the one in which you never stop growing. But how do we get there?
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Like a lot of the other concepts I’ve discussed in and around Good Burdens, the key lies in creating practices. Over a long enough lifetime, we can acquire a lot of wisdom by accident- if we’re lucky. But why leave it to luck, and why wait for it to jump into our laps?
The deliberate pursuit of wisdom is both possible and rewarding. Build such a pursuit into your life through one or more routines: make time to read books about the aspects of understanding the world that is most important to you. Attend classes and lectures. Travel, whether near or far, and expose yourself to unfamiliar ideas and people. Do this all mindfully- acknowledging to yourself that you are doing so to acquire whatever wisdom can be acquired from the experience. If you create it as a goal that you carry into your experiences, you will mine more wisdom from them than passively showing up.
With wisdom, you can adopt the digital tools and habits that serve your relationships, creativity and capacity, and confidently missing out on the rest. Technology is an effort to get everything under control but using technology as a means to unburden ourselves is just window-dressing; it distracts us from the good burden of truly living. It leaves us aimless and unmoored, left asking What is it all for?
Carrying the right burdens gives your life direction. Recognizing what those good burdens are and embracing them is what it is to be wise.
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The goal is aliveness.
The purpose is love.
Take up the good burden of being wise.
This post originally appeared on my dedicated Medium blog. Read my new book, Good Burdens: How to Live Joyfully in the Digital Age today.
