Concerning Wisdom

Is it something you can 'get'? And is it even worth having in the first place?

As a young man, I had an unusual desire mixed up with all the usual ones - sex, money, success, approbation and so on. This desire knocked around at the back of my mind , occasionally coming nervously to the front, where , disoriented by the exposure, it retreated into the shadows again.

The desire was for wisdom. I wasn’t sure what wisdom actually was, or how to come by it, but it seemed crucial to living a successful life. It was different from intelligence, I was sure of that, because there were so many clever people around, many of them politicians or right wing columnists in the daily newspapers, who were simultaneously stupid.

There were very few people I considered ‘wise’ existing in the media universe, so I looked to literature for this elusive beast, often finding insights scattered around a particular novel or book of psychology or mythology.

It gradually dawned on me, however, that wisdom was not something you ‘possessed’ like a house or a car. After years of searching for ‘it’ one thing was clear - if such a thing as wisdom existed, it came and went like all the other phenomena around me. Often, despite what I considered my small and valuable store of accumulated wisdom, I acted contrary to its precepts. ‘It’ was ephemeral and unreliable and sometimes disappeared altogether.

For most of human history, wisdom was the preserve of organised religion which passed on so-called insights, usually moral, to the common man via sermons and rituals. But in the era I came to age in, secularism was then, as now, the primary world view of the average man or woman. We were left to work out for ourselves what ‘it was all about’ and how one should behave. We were thus, as it seemed to me, at the mercy of our cultural circumstances, which were more or less random.

Most people seemed untroubled by this conundrum, concentrating instead on whatever it took to get through the day to accumulate wealth, love and security, but I couldn’t let it go. I ploughed through the Greek philosophers, flirted with mysticism, had a go at existentialism , tried to get a grip on Jung, sunk into Zen Buddhism, and read every psychology book I could get my hands on. But at the end of it all - if there is an end to it all, which there isn’t - if you asked me what my wisdom amounted to today, I would struggle to tell you.

If you insisted I continue nonetheless, I might say that wisdom was not the same as happiness - which originally, I thought it was a means of attaining. No one escapes unhappiness in life, however wise - and often, unreflective people are the most cheerful. Or as Thomas Gray would have it, ‘if ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise’.

Pressed further, and asked to compress my lifelong wisdom into a few digestible nuggets, I might find myself imprudently reeling off a small list of seemingly unrelated saws (which would probably be different tomorrow or the day after). . These might include: Love the truth but be careful about speaking it because people prefer comforting lies; be humble about your opinions they are probably wrong; it costs nothing to be kind - and, despite that, people can be crueller than you might expect; consequences are always unpredictable, for good or ill; doing your best doesn’t guarantee success (you need to come to terms with that); and all is change and transformation, however fixed and immutable the world appears.

I could, I suppose, go on, but life goes on in its own way whatever you happen to think about it. Perhaps this is the most profound piece of wisdom I can locate - that things are finally out of your control, whatever you want to believe. Even your very thoughts are not in your control - they just happen to you, like every other event. My early belief in existentialism, or radical individual freedom, has been reversed. I am , at the end of my journey, a reluctant fatalist.

My struggle to find wisdom has culminated, if that is the word, in those few brief principles, if principles they are. And it was a struggle to get that far. But what a struggle! Nothing in life has given me more pleasure than to find a new idea, or group of ideas, that sets my mind to work and fires my imagination. Now I am 70 years old such fresh ideas are thin on the ground, but I hope that, before I complete my time on earth, I will still stumble upon one or two that will challenge me or make me think my world anew. For as a final snippet of wisdom, I can only add this old (but true) chestnut - it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.