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

by Krista Tippett

This book is a map in words to important territory we all are on now together. It’s a collection of pointers that treat the margins as seriously as the noisy center. For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now. Seismic shifts in common life, as in geophysical reality, begin in spaces and cracks.

the human condition, in all its mess and glory, remains the ground on which all of our ambitions flourish or crash.

There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime—love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.

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.

was there a religious or spiritual background to your childhood, however you define that now?

There’s a powerful saying that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. They tell us about who we are, what is possible for us, what we might call upon. They also remind us we’re not alone with whatever faces us.

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.

I don’t think we have the answers to the problem of abortion in our society, whether it’s the problem of abortion itself or the problem of how we’re going to mediate our differences about abortion. And a willingness to admit that is very, very difficult. 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? Where do you have doubts? I’ve said this to somebody recently: I don’t understand how you can work on an issue for 35 years as complicated as this and never change your mind at all about anything. What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. I think that you become more willing to be vulnerable at a moment when you recognize that what you have done has not gotten you where you want to be. So an element of vulnerability is some modicum of helplessness. And if you don’t think you need any help and you think everything is just hunky-dory, well, then, there’s absolutely no reason to be vulnerable.

And I have learned that people in the center are not going to be the big change makers. You’ve got to put yourself at the margins and be willing to risk in order to make change. More importantly, you have got to approach differences with this notion that there is good in the other. That’s it. And that if we can’t figure out how to do that, and if there isn’t the crack in the middle where there’s some people on both sides who absolutely refuse to see the other as evil, this is going to continue. 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.

“The passion to live rightly on earth and to spread right living.”

In the crack in the middle, where people on both sides absolutely refuse to see each other as evil, we rediscover the power of words to move us towards each other and away. We simultaneously circle back to the necessity of virtue to hold us to a care with our words—the intention we bring to what we speak; the trustworthiness and generosity we impart to the spaces in which we share our lives. The point of learning to speak together differently is learning to live together differently. It’s a dance of words with arts of living.

Our bodies tell us the truth of life that our minds can deny: that we are in any moment as much about softness as fortitude. Always in need of care and tenderness. Life is fluid, evanescent, evolving in every cell, in every breath. Never perfect. To be alive is by definition messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise. How we open or close to the reality that we never arrive at safe enduring stasis is the matter, the raw material, of wisdom.

The core of life is about losses and deaths both subtle and catastrophic, over and over again, and also about loving and rising again.

Love doesn’t always work as we want it to, or look like something intimate and beautiful. There are times and places in human existence when love means life on the line, but most of us need not live that way most of the time. Love as a public good needs yeasty groups of social artists, and it also requires bridge people to stand with, speak for, and protect those whose very identities are threatened by conflict. Sometimes love, in public as in private, means stepping back.

We all live lives that are complicated and that at times, with infinite variation, feel overwhelming. But we know people in our immediate world who step beyond themselves, into care. If you know them up close, you know they are not saints or heroes—take note of that, and take comfort. 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. Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues, love most especially. It’s appeared on too many bumper stickers for my taste. But it is a form of instant gratification.

Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It’s a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Hope is a cognitive, behavioral process that we learn when we experience adversity, when we have relationships that are trustworthy, when people have faith in our ability to get out of a jam.

I think we lose sight of the beauty. The most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath. The moments I look back in my life and think, “God, those are the moments that made me,” were moments of struggle.

Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability. It acknowledges from the outset that things will go wrong. All of our solutions will eventually outlive their usefulness. We will make messes, and disruption we do not cause or predict will land on us. This is the drama of being alive. To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It’s a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness—not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn’t overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves.