Wisdom

Wisdom is a tricky topic. You know it when you see it. So, we’ve always had a complex relationship with the proclamation that MEA is the world’s first midlife wisdom school. Anyone who professes they’re wise probably isn’t.

Chip’s August 10th Wisdom Well post "My Wisdom Principles & Practices" caused me to reflect on my own perspective as someone who has spent many, many weeks at MEA Baja. With Chip’s permission, here’s my version (in italics) of “Chip’s Wisdom Principles & Practices 2.0”:

"No one can give away wisdom. A teacher can only lead you to it via words, hoping you will have the courage to look within yourself and find it inside your own consciousness…The wisdom humanity seeks lies within the consciousness of all." - Sydney Banks

“Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.” - Poet Hermann Hesse

I had never pondered the difference between these two words until my friend Joaquin Dulitzky told me the following:

In the next decade, we’re going to see a significant surge in the value placed on wisdom. Unlike knowledge, wisdom is one of the key differentiators for humans versus artificial intelligence. With this in mind, I wanted to start capturing my wisdom principles and practices. Of course, this is a work-in-progress so it will evolve with time.

“Write a letter to a child as if you knew you were going to die soon, passing along what you most wish for them to know. What is your deepest wisdom, your highest truth? The things that delight you, in which you’d like the child also to take delight? Secrets you are ready to reveal or heroes who have inspired you? Distill the essence of your legacy.” - Mirabai Starr, “Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics”

In my sessions as a spiritual director, I started noticing something: whenever someone described someone as “wise”, it was usually a sage or spiritual teacher of some sort: a Richard Rohr, a Ken Wilbur, a Ram Dass, a Tara Brach.

As you all know, I’ve had lots of extra time these past two weeks to become a binge watcher (not a weight watcher, though, as this surgery naturally adds 10-20 pounds within a few days). I think it’s ironic that two American film celebrities came out with documentaries telling their stories at almost exactly the same time: “Arnold” Schwartznegger on Netflix and MIchael J Fox in “Still” on AppleTV.

Wise, poetic wisdom, that’s the brand of Maya Angelou. One of her most famous quotes has defined how I’ve tried to live my life: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Our very first MEA cohort five and a half years ago named themselves after “Maya.”