I found this great video on YouTube on how to be wise. It goes through the accepted definition of being wise and whether it’s still appropriate in today’s world. What I found most interesting in this where the speaker Simon Cohen talks about children and how we misintrept thier behaviour (13 mins). I agree with the speaker who says that children have an inate wisdom in the way in which they stop, pause, look at everything (every leaf, every face) and find the meaning and story behind it.
It reminds me of this book that I have read many times, the Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik. Where the author speaks about how
- children’s brians are like an open highway,
- how information travels around thier brains and
- how they try to find every possible use of everything, like new ways to play with their toys, which we the parents say ‘no you’re supposed to play with it like this’ or ‘no it doesn’t work that way’ before we grab it from them and show them the right way to use it.
how to be wise – I’ve read the book on the left several times, I must get around to reading the one on the right, been on my bookshelf for some years
What’s happening here is that the child is trying to find out new ways to do something. Because they haven’t been trained in how to use or do a particular thing their neurological pathways are all open. Ours however have been closed, we’ve found the fastest way to do something.
We’ve been trained by school, by work, by society in general how to do something quickly and efficiently.
There’s some logic behind this, as there are certain things that we need to be able to do quickly and efficiently which we’ve inherited from our cave dwelling predecessors. Like when a beast would attack them, the caveman didn’t have time to plot out all the different ways he could fend off the wild animal, he had to learn to act quickly. Our modern day equivalent would be crossing the road, there are certain rules we need to drum into ourselves and the middle of the road is not the time to start theorising on new propositions.
Is now really the best time to weigh up all the alternatives?
However I think some of the modern day great minds, people like Steve Jobs (Apple), Ed Catmul (Pixar), the guys who invented twitter, google, youTube etc. are those who are willing to look at different ways to do things rather than follow rules. I think the video below says it best, there are two kinds of people,
- those who follow instructions the way our education system teaches us and never step out to try to follow new ideas
- and those who learn to think, take chances and not be afraid
Be great to hear your thoughts.
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For me the part which stands out in the video is the idea of being present in each moment, which as you said, comes naturally to children. For us it takes work as we get caught up in our thoughts, believing they are real and we may miss what’s in front of our eyes.
There is possibly another possible description of wisdom… knowing that the way we feel is never caused by our external circumstances, it’s always from within our own thinking. Though our general circumstances can remain the same day to day, our feelings on individual days may vary greatly, depending on what we are thinking about at each moment. When we think about fears for the future or sorrows of the past, we may feel stressed but when we think of something like our children’s smiles or Gods mercy, we may feel peaceful, though in all those thoughts our external circumstances remained the same.
Knowing that we are always living in the feelings of our own thinking is quite liberating because it means we have the potential to be set free from the circumstances of our lives.