On wisdom

Let’s be honest, the most important and most underrated virtue of all is wisdom, more so than courage or love. The reason for this is because nobody is born into wisdom. Children, when they are born, do not know fear or shame or guilt or hatred... WE teach all of these things and many more. Children are, indeed, born a whiteboard where ideas and ideals, values, virtues and vices are added by anyone having access to their minds. This is not an ideal state of being, as children are also born given to foolishness, driven by emotion and wants, and carrying a heavy baggage of genetic material that may be flawed. Yet, most do know love, as they feel, offer and receive plenty in its purest form from parents first and foremost, and some do know courage, either by lacking fear or facing it innately. The same is true of all virtues: generosity, kindness, mercy, patience etc. Some are simply born possessing such things and must struggle to retain these qualities later in life. Yet not wisdom. No child has ever been born wise, save for legends and religious tales, and even then, the spirit that dwelt within the body was much older and had witnessed much.

Wisdom is the most important of virtues because it is the most difficult to attain, and the one that shadows all the others. Indeed, one needs to master all the others before even contemplating wisdom. Now, defining wisdom is as difficult as defining love or honour. You will know it if you see it, but in its authentic form it is rare ... and precious. Wisdom is not just the cumulation of all other virtues, it is also the one that can never be had in excess. Yes, it is possible to have an excess of love (to the point of being blinded by it), or of courage (to the point of insanity), or of kindness (to the point of self-destruction) or of patience (to the point of never acting on impulse even when the time is right for it), etc. Yet there can never be an excess of wisdom, since wisdom commands not just what action should be taken and when, but also to what degree. It implies not only understanding of surroundings and awareness of the bigger picture, of players and consequences, of characters, times and strengths or weaknesses, but also intuition, knowledge, foresight and freedom of mind.

Wisdom is difficult to grasp and even harder to attain, which is why it is never too early to start pursuing it. Like the ideal of an absolute truth, full wisdom will never be truly attained, because the upper limits of it are as undefined as those of love and as infinite as the capacity for human greatness. There will always be room for better, yet the world today does not need for all to be Zen monks, but for a few more to set their minds on becoming wiser, without waiting for the passage of time to do it all for them. If time is an infinite river, flowing into a sea of absolute wisdom, one will always travel further by paddling than by simply being carried by the flow and by the wind. Even if, in the end, you are no closer to reaching the sea of absolute than the ones doing nothing or paddling against the flow, the first step in becoming wiser is understanding that the goal is not reaching the sea, but travelling away from foolishness each day. In the end, one must not seek to compare the distance travelled, but to respect the perils of any journey, as no two rivers are alike, and no two journeys through life are the same.

As it stands, wisdom is not laughed at or berated, nor are the wiser persecuted or their advice forbidden. To do so would be an acknowledgement of wisdom. Instead it is ignored, both in policy and in culture. It is treated as either a feat of time and experience, or is misrepresented as being different in each culture, when it actually isn’t. There are no songs about wisdom, no poems about its merits and it is often not even mentioned among virtues.

Why this is so has, to my knowledge, not been researched. Indeed, to research why wisdom is underrated and often overlooked would mean one first has to stop overlooking it and understand its potential. My guess is that there is simply no room for wisdom in a world dominated by the desire to have more. The wisest of us need neither power nor wealth. They are not heavy spenders and do not engage in political struggles, because they understand that such things are not only useless to living a complete life, but also harmful to the individual, to the species and to the planet... in short, to humankind as a whole.