Listening to the voice of wisdom

I wonder if we have lost sight of wisdom. Or have forgotten how to recognise it.

Because wisdom isn’t knowledge on steroids. It’s not the verdict of the most well-read person or someone with the most qualifications.

It is a quality of a different order and isn’t in service of the person exercising it.

Instead, it is the ability to contemplate life, conduct, and exercise sound judgement about the means and ends. Wisdom displays compassion, self-transcendence, and virtues of ethics and benevolence, recognising that one answer does not fit all situations.

It is, therefore, a paradoxical dance because it requires both an edge perspective – to see the whole more clearly – and the empathy and insight of being close to sense the underlying issues.

So where might we hear the voice of wisdom today, because I suspect it isn’t shouting…

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

+ T S Eliot, from Choruses from ‘The Rock’, 1934

Or, in the voice of one of this century’s sages:

“The greatest illusion,” said the mole, “is that life should be perfect.”

+ Charlie Mackesy, from The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse.

Pause. See differently. Re-story 🌿

~ Go to SueHeatherington for more of my daily pauses...