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

by Krista Tippett

Listening is about being present, not just about being quiet. I meet others with the life I’ve lived, not just with my questions.

are we not of interest to each other?

So I think that the truth of that poem is not about true things or things that happened, but rather in the question are we not of interest to each other? Which to me isn’t about, I like her shoes or, oh, he has a fascinating job. It’s much deeper than that. Are we human beings who are in community, do we call to each other? Do we heed each other? Do we want to know each other? To reach across what can be a huge void between human beings. I look at my children and I think, as deeply as I know you I do not know what’s inside your heads. But I crave knowing them that deeply.

I began to learn an art of conversation about undergirding truths from the Benedictine monks of St. John’s Abbey of Collegeville when I moved to Minnesota by way of one of life’s odd, unplanned trajectories in the mid-1990s.

The art of starting new kinds of conversations, of creating new departure points and new outcomes in our common grappling, is not rocket science. But it does require that we nuance or retire some habits so ingrained that they feel like the only way it can be done. 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.

Listening is an everyday social art, but it’s an art we have neglected and must learn anew. Listening is more than being quiet while the other person speaks until you can say what you have to say. I like the language Rachel Naomi Remen uses with young doctors to describe what they should practice: “generous listening.” 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. In American life, we trade mostly in answers—competing answers—and in questions that corner, incite, or entertain. In journalism we have a love affair with the “tough” question, which is often an assumption masked as an inquiry and looking for a fight. I edited the “spiritual background of your life” question out of our produced show for years, for fear that it sounded soft, though I knew how it shaped everything that followed. My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits. If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit...

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.

Our cultural mode of debating issues by way of competing certainties comes with a drive to resolution. We want others to acknowledge that our answers are right. We call the debate or get on the same page or take a vote and move on. The alternative involves a different orientation to the point of conversing in the first place: to invite searching—not on who is right and who is wrong and the arguments on every side; not on whether we can agree; but on what is at stake in human terms for us all. There is value in learning to speak ...

The conversation was big and messy in a whole new way. It was uncomfortable and also thrilling because it opened provocative territory we hadn’t charted before we began—whether the sexual revolution was good for us, and how to rehumanize and deepen our relationship to sexuality in public as well as private spheres.

You were listing a couple of qualities that you thought were necessary to bring constructive, forward thinking approaches to a difficult issue. One of them that really struck me was “the courage to be vulnerable in front of those we passionately disagree with.”

What is it in your own position that gives you trouble? What is it in the position of the other that you are attracted to?

For this, as clearly as any challenge, brings home the axial question: 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?

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.”

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 that knows and knows that it knows. And

Convenience is an illusion, merely shifting the burden of process and consequences. Labor is real. But so is pleasure real and enduring. In old/new ways, we can factor in pleasure with a heightened awareness. We can insist on delight as a virtue.

I begin to wonder if beauty is somehow as elemental to life as carbon and chlorophyll—a key component that imparts life and hope and even transcendence to the natural world and to the religious and the nonreligious of the human species. Might beauty be a bridge we can walk across occasionally to each other, a bridge that might help humble and save us? To insist on beauty in physical spaces where we go to learn and to play and to work and to heal is, we are now learning, to make all of these pursuits more fulsome and life-giving. To attend to the beauty in the other is to redirect the trap of “charity” and “development” in the century now past—to become unable to define and reduce other human beings as problems to help and to solve. The social venture entrepreneur Jacqueline Novogratz, who works in some of the poorest places in the world, asks a question wherever she goes that she experiences to call forth inner abundance: what are you doing when you feel most beautiful?

On beauty as a virtue.