Learning Wisdom

“He’s good at school, but he’s got no ‘street smarts’,” I’ve heard it said. You probably have heard this, too, in describing some everyday fool who gets in meaningless squabbles while making the Dean’s List.

In my own life, there have been times when I’ve been neither book nor street smart. Like the experience I chronicled in my book about boarding a bus illegally in Rome and then falling asleep on the bus without knowing where I was headed. The experience was neither smart nor wise.

I’ve known...