Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

by Krista Tippett

Humanity gave voice to the questions that have animated religion and philosophy ever since: What does it mean to be human? What matters in a life? What matters in a death? How to be of service to each other and the world?

These questions are being reborn, reframed, in our age of interdependence with far-flung strangers. The question of what it means to be human is now inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet.

I grew up full of longing but unsure of its object,

what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.

We don’t do things adults learn to do, like calm ourselves, and become less narcissistic. Much of politics and media sends us in the opposite, infantilizing direction. We reduce great questions of meaning and morality to “issues” and simplify them to two sides, allowing pundits and partisans to frame them in irreconcilable extremes. But most of us don’t see the world this way, and it’s not the way the world actually works.

I have yet to meet a wise person who doesn’t know how to find some joy even in the midst of what is hard, and to smile and laugh easily, including at oneself. A sense of humor is high on my list of virtues, in interplay with humility and compassion and a capacity to change when that is the right thing to do.

It’s one of those virtues that softens us for all the others. Desmond Tutu, whom I found impossible to doubt, says that God has a sense of humor.

I’m not surprised by the fact that inexplicable and terrible things happen in a cosmos as complicated as ours, with sentient beings like us running the show. But I am emboldened by the fact that surprise is the only constant. We are never really running the show, never really in control, and nothing will go quite as we imagined it. Our highest ambitions will be off, but so will our worst prognostications. I am emboldened by the puzzling, redemptive truth to which each and every one of my conversations has added nuance, that we are made by what would break us. Birth itself is a triumph through a bloody, treacherous process. We only learn to walk when we risk falling down, and this equation holds—with commensurately more complex dynamics—our whole lives long. I have heard endless variations on this theme—the battle with illness that saves the life that follows; the childhood pain that leads to vocation; the disability that opens into wholeness and a presence to the hidden wholeness of others. You have your own stories, the dramatic and more ordinary moments where what has gone wrong becomes an opening to more of yourself and part of your gift to the world. This is the beginning of wisdom.

But tolerance doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures, indulges.

It doesn’t even invite us to know each other, to be curious, to be open to be moved or surprised by each other.

Here are some words I love, words that describe presence rather than means towards an end: nourishing, edifying, redemptive; courageous, generous, winsome; adventurous, curious, tender.

Here’s what we crave. We crave truth tellers. We crave real truth. There is so much baloney all the time. You know, the performance of political speech, of speeches you see on the news, doesn’t it often feel to you like there should be a thought bubble over it that says, “what I really would say if I could say it is . . .”

there is more change possible in our lifetimes than we can foresee.

everyone around the table to begin to answer that question through the story of their lives: Who is God? What is prayer? How to approach the problem of evil? What is the content of Christian hope? I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can’t disagree with your experience. And once I have a sense of your experience, you and I are in relationship, acknowledging the complexity in each other’s position, listening less guardedly. The difference in our opinions will probably remain intact, but it no longer defines what is possible between us.

The wise Quaker author and teacher Parker Palmer, my beloved mentor and friend, likens the human soul to a wild animal in the backwoods of the psyche, sure to run away if cross-examined.

think that we all feel that we’re not enough to make a difference, that we need to be more somehow, wealthier or more educated or otherwise different than the people we are. And according to this story, we are exactly what’s needed. And to just wonder about that a little: what if we were exactly what’s needed? What then? How would I live if I was exactly what’s needed to heal the world?

We’ve all been trained to be advocates for what we care about. This has its place and its value in civil society, but it can get in the way of the axial move of deciding to care about each other.

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.

Generous listening in fact yields better questions. It’s not true what they taught us in school; there is such a thing as a bad question.

My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.

It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.

Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I wish I could throw Elizabeth Alexander’s question by way of poetry, “Are we not of interest to each other?” into town hall meetings, the halls of Congress, and let it roll around for a while.

There is value in learning to speak together honestly and relate to each other with dignity, without rushing to common ground that would leave all the hard questions hanging.

Often you can read an instructional manual or a textbook or whatever, without paying all that much attention. You skim your way through it to get to the heart of the matter. But you can’t read poetry that way. Poetry slows you down. And anything in our world now that slows us down is to be valued and maybe as a gift and even a calling from God.

like Cal DeWitt’s definition of religion: “The passion to live rightly on earth and to spread right living.”

A friend of mine who’s a wonderful poet, Susan Stewart, said that hearing is how we touch at a distance. Isn’t that beautiful? I think that’s also how I start projects in some ways: I just try to listen for what something needs to become. Or to find the right question. Listening is obviously a very specific thing in a conversation, but it’s also a practice for me as I respond to spaces. The felt quality of the architecture of a space already has all this information in it. You’re listening to the space.

Jon Kabat-Zinn was introduced to meditation while he was studying molecular biology at MIT. He says that scientists make the best meditators because they are most comfortable with knowing what they don’t know.

So the practice of mindfulness, whether you’re doing it in some formal way, meditating in a sitting posture or lying down doing a body scan or doing mindful hatha yoga—the real practice is living your life as if it really mattered from moment to moment. The real practice is life itself. It is coming to all of those senses in hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and also, we could say, minding.

You quote Thoreau in Walden, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

I’m drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent—forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I’m sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us.

Is it beautiful, or is it ugly? This question was proposed as a theological measuring stick, a credible litmus test. Does this action reveal a delight in this creation and in the image of a creative, merciful God who could have made it? Is it reverent with the mystery of that?

Culturally, beauty is one of those muddied words. Our minds have been trained to go to perfect bodies and flawless faces on the covers of magazines. But that, as the late great Irish poet and philosopher of beauty John O’Donohue helpfully distinguished, is glamour. I’ve taken his definition as my own, for naming beauty in all its nuance in the moment-to-moment reality of our days: beauty is that in the presence of which we feel more alive.

landscape wasn’t just matter, but that it was actually alive. Landscape recalls you into a mindful mode of stillness, solitude, and silence, where you can truly receive time.

we don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another, if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness? There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group—the white group—can despise another group, which is the black group. And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something I find extremely beautiful and strong, that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. There are some elements despicable in ourselves, which we don’t want to look at, but which are part of our natures. We are mortal.

People ask me about the common denominators of the wisest people I’ve encountered. Alongside all the virtues that accompany and anchor wisdom, there is a characteristic physical presence that Jean Vanier epitomizes with others I’ve met like Desmond Tutu, Wangari Maathai, Thích Nhât Hanh. Here’s what it feels like, what I can report: an embodied capacity to hold power and tenderness in a surprising, creative interplay. This way of being is palpable, and refreshing, and in its way jarring, hard to figure out. Among other things, it transmutes my sense of what power feels like and is there for. This is the closest I can come to describing the sense I have, at this point, of wisdom incarnate, and it is an experience of physical presence as much as consciousness and spirit.

We’ve been treating the earth as if it were a supply house and a sewer. We’ve been grabbing, extracting resources from it for our cars and our hair dryers and our bombs, and we’ve been pouring the waste into it until it’s overflowing, but our earth is not a supply house and a sewer. It is our larger body. We breathe it. We taste it. We are it, and it is time now that we venerate that incredible flowering of life that takes every aspect of our physicality.

I have love in my life, many forms of loving. As I settled into singleness, I grew saner, kinder, more generous, more loving in untheatrical everyday ways. I can’t name the day when I suddenly realized that the lack of love in my life was not a reality but a poverty of imagination and a carelessly narrow use of an essential word.

And here is another, deeper carelessness, which I am absolving in a spirit of adventure: I come to understand that for most of my life, when I was looking for love, I was looking to be loved. In this, I am a prism of my world. I am a novice at love in all its fullness, a beginner. The intention to walk through the world practicing love across relationships and encounters feels like a great frontier.

But good questions, generously posed, seriously held, are powerful things.

The virtue of tolerance told us to keep observations of moral or spiritual imagination to ourselves, to check them at the doors of our places of vocation and learning. We held them close and starved them of the oxygen of living questions as well as answers, communally, in a corrective interplay with each other.

People are looking for community, right now, though we don’t have confidence in love. We have much more confidence in anger and hate. We believe anger is powerful. We believe hate is powerful. And we believe love is wimpy.

I sometimes think we, in the United States, think we ought to do something about everything and that it’s my job to fix everything. Well it’s not. That’s way beyond us. It’s more important, I think, that we listen deeply to our stories and then see where it leads. And that’s the piece. If we all do our part . . . Whatever our part is, wherever we are. Whatever our part is. Just do one thing. That’s all we have to do.

Here are specific qualities in the lives of yeasty groups he’s seen transform realities in places from Northern Ireland to Colombia to Nepal: they refuse to accept a dualist approach—us against you. They are armed with love and courage, and these things in action are closely connected with creativity: “Reaching out to enemies, embracing complexity, creativity, and risk add up to moral imagination in action. . . . They are artists.” Lovers are artists.

Feel how when you extend a kindness, however simple, you are energized and not depleted.

Scientists, again, are proving that acts of kindness and generosity are literally infectious, passing from stranger to stranger to stranger.

So “what if the mightiest word is love?” is a question that asks in these times, as an incredibly heterogeneous collective, as an incredibly diverse country, is there such a thing as a love that can supersede or guide or take us through disagreement? What would that mean? What would that love look like? Mighty, that’s a very, very particular kind of word. Is there a kind of enduring power of love, as I so fervently want to believe?

Something I think about a lot is how the word that we took after the 1960s to live together with otherness was tolerance, and it’s not nearly a large and mighty enough word. Love demands much more.

This is a continual argument I have with Christianity. I always felt that it was answering a question I wasn’t asking. If you decide that the most important thing, the highest possible value, is life—breath in the body and walking around and eating sandwiches and whatever—then you’re lost. Then you’ve lost. Because we’re all going to die. So then you have to posit this whole other set of things that you can’t see and you can’t connect with. As I said, I’m a practical person. I want to be able to see it and I want to be able to do it. So if I posit instead that the most important thing is love, then what I have is, yes, I have a world that’s full of suffering and evil and pain. And I have something to do. I have something to look for, and I have something to do. For me that works better.