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

by Krista Tippett

Our questions are intimate and civilizational all at once—definitions of when life begins and when death happens; of the meaning of marriage and family and identity; of our relationship to the natural world; of our relationship to technology and our relationships through technology.

The cultivation of inner life arose in interplay with the startling proposition that the well-being of others beyond kin and tribe—the stranger, the orphan, the outcast—was linked to one’s own.

Wisdom leavens intelligence, and ennobles consciousness, and advances evolution itself.

Our spiritual lives are where we reckon head-on with the mystery of ourselves, and the mystery of each other.

The adage that “he who does not know history is doomed to repeat it” doesn’t go far enough. History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves.

The digital world, though a new Wild West in many ways, is on some basic level simply another screen on which we project the excesses and possibilities of life in flesh and blood.

This realization unsettled my sense of personal progress and education: it was possible to have freedom and plenty in the West and craft an empty life; it was possible to “have nothing” in the East and create a life of intimacy and dignity and beauty.

Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are not the stuff of saints and heroes, but tools for the art of living.

I’ve organized my reflections around five of these raw materials, basic aspects of the human everyday, which I’ve come to see as breeding grounds for wisdom.

The first is words.

The second is the body.

The third is love.

The fourth is faith.

The fifth is hope.

This book is for people who want to take up the great questions of our time with imagination and courage, to nurture new realities in the spaces we inhabit, and to do so expectantly and with joy.

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.

The ancient rabbis understood books, texts, the very letters of certain words as living, breathing entities. Words make worlds.

Tolerance was a baby step to make pluralism possible, and pluralism, like every ism, holds an illusion of control. It doesn’t ask us to care for the stranger. It doesn’t even invite us to know each other, to be curious, to be open to be moved or surprised by each other.

Of course all words are just containers on some level, but that is really the point. The connection between words and meanings resembles the symbiosis between religion and spirituality.

We are starved, and ready, for fresh language to approach each other; this is what Elizabeth Alexander names.

Are we human beings who are in community, do we call to each other?

Profound truth, like the vocabulary of virtue, eludes formulation.

It quickly becomes rigid, gives way to abstraction or cliché. But put a spiritual insight to a story, an experience, a face; describe where it anchors in the ground of your being; and it will change you in the telling and others in the listening.

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.

It’s a very important story for our times. This task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It’s the restoration of the world.

It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you. The world to which you have proximity.

Culture has a story, and every person in it participates in that story. The world is made up of stories; it’s not made up of facts.

Now, in the act of offering what I’ve learned to others, I receive it for the first time, fully, for myself.

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.

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

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who

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.

There’s a lot of pressure, and it’s much easier, to preach to the choir versus listening to people who disagree with you. But the choir is already there; the choir doesn’t need us.

can human beings come to understand their own well-being as linked to that of others, in wider and wider circles, beyond family and tribe?

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

To some degree the haikuist is constantly trying to capture the full complexity of a human experience, but in the fewest words possible. And that discipline is a very interesting one.

but in this very short five syllable–seven syllable–five syllable format.

I refer to them as conversational haikus or poetry in conversation.

The philosopher Simone Weil defined prayer as “absolutely unmixed attention.”

I have felt increasingly that what we are really talking about is not how we can have more civil conversation. What we’re talking about in the context of our society, for one thing, is how we can learn how to have a democratic conversation.

Story is such a source of nurture that we cannot become really true human beings for ourselves and for each other without story—and without finding ways in which to tell it, to share it, to create it, to encourage younger people to create their own story.

“prophetic imagination”

Even in the more liberal theological tradition in which I was raised, we only talked about the prophets as moral teachers. There was no attention to the artistic, aesthetic quality of how they did that. But it is the only way in which you can think outside of the box.

Medicine became an art of treating our parts, not our whole. Religion divided us inside with high mystical notions that we are souls trapped in bodies, and theologies that made flesh and sin indistinguishable. Strangely, interestingly, the Enlightenment fed into this too.

Physical, emotional, and spiritual are more entangled than we guessed, more interactive in every direction, and this knowledge is a form of power.

Buddhism in all its variation has cultivated a sophisticated psychology of the heart-mind, never separating the two in its languages of origin. Across thousands of years, it focused on contemplative disciplines to investigate and calm the mind as everyday practice.

the real practice is living your life as if it really mattered from moment to moment.

You really put a fine point on what’s at stake—that any moment in which we’re not aware, any moment in which we’re not attentive, is lost. You quote Thoreau in Walden, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

It’s the human condition. We call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens. That’s the species name we’ve given ourselves. And that comes from the Latin sapere, which means “to taste” or “to know.” The species