on Wisdom — What is wisdom & where can it be found? (Part 2 of 2)
This is part 2 of a two-part essay on wisdom. You can read part 1 here.
What follows is a series of statements — part declarative, part exploratory, part stream of consciousness — all in pursuit of capturing the essence of what wisdom has come to mean to me.
What is wisdom & where can it be found?
Wisdom is not a goal attainable by the mere frivolous desire for it.
We are not anointed with wisdom, nor is it bestowed on us by others.
Wisdom is not a quality others see in us, nor is it a plateau we one day climb high enough to reach. Wisdom, rather, is an ephemeral state of mind we journey towards and slowly ascend by virtue of...
...watching intently
...listening carefully
...experiencing deeply
...and living long.
We cannot be wisdom, nor can we see it or buy it or find it or trade for it. Wisdom isn't for sale. Wisdom is hard-won and earned. It is the long game accrual of truth that grows, matures, compounds, and ages only after traveling long distances, surviving painstaking trials, and taking careful account of hard-to-see, often deeply obscured life lessons.
Wisdom is nuanced and contextual and consequential.
It is base-level and street-level, eye-level and sky-high.
Wisdom is rarely THIS and hardly ever THAT.
Wisdom is the learned experience of mistaking, misunderstanding, and misinterpreting situations we were absolutely certain about right up until the very moment we realized that what we thought we knew was never even a possibility.
Wisdom is SHAZAM and POOF and MAGIC and AH HA!
It's lightening-in-a-bottle and the earned outcome and consequence of exponential pattern-matching.
Wisdom is coming alive again and again, but only after dying over and over.
It is seeing without sight and hearing even when there are no sounds.
Wisdom is the ground of ground truth,
the negative space before first principles,
and the sky over a bottomless pit.
Wisdom is the additive, multiplicative, and exponential accrual of observations made over and over again and again for decades and centuries and millennia, not minutes or days or weeks.
Wisdom is not hanging out at the corner store or walking down the street
It's not high up there on the hill or buried in your back pocket.
Wisdom, rather, is right there, deep inside of you.
We don't one day arrive at wisdom. And we don't HOLD it or HAVE it or CARRY it.
Wisdom is shapeless
...and ageless
...and timeless
...and formless
...and quantum.
Wisdom doesn't awaken in us.
We awaken to wisdom.
Wisdom isn't something we GAIN or GET or WIN. And, we don't LOSE Wisdom, either.
We don't chase after it or run it down or search for it or even seek it out because Wisdom has been right there the whole time.
Wisdom is truth
...and knowing
...and understanding
Wisdom is never a goal
...or a plan
...or a destination
...or an aspiration
It is instead the greatest adventure we could ever choose to take.
Wisdom is a long, winding journey of paying exquisitely careful attention
...of living
...of dying
...of learning
...of being reborn
again and again and again.