Trivia The 20 Ingredients of Wisdom; (TLDR)

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Wisdom is one of the grandest and oddest words out there, so lofty it doesn't sound like something we could ever consciously strive to be. But wisdom deserves to be rehabilitated and take its place among a host of other, more typical aspirations we might have; we should be as keen to end up wise as we are to be thin or prosperous. Wisdom is just a very beautiful word for a set of qualities of character that enable us to face reality with serenity, good humour, kindness and resilience. Crucially, being wise is not something we are ever born. It is a skill that can be learnt, in part, by knowing what it is we are aiming at. This is a guide to what wisdom can be and at the same time, a gentle and elegant visual reminder to remain as wise as we are at our best and calmest moments.

1. Realism

The wise are, first and foremost, 'realistic' about how difficult many things will be. They aren't devoid of hope (that would be a folly of its own), but they are conscious of the complexities entailed in any project: for example, raising a child, starting a business, spending an agreeable weekend with the family, changing the nation, falling in love... Knowing that something difficult is being attempted doesn't rob the wise of ambitions, but it makes them more steadfast, calmer and less prone to panic about the problems that will invariably come their way.

2. Gratitude

Properly aware that much can and does go wrong, the wise are unusually alive to moments of calm and beauty, even extremely modest ones (a sunny morning, a piece of toast, a bath), of the kind that those with grander plans rush past. With the dangers and tragedies of existence firmly in mind, the wise take pleasure in a single, uneventful, sunny day, or some pretty flowers growing by a brick wall, the charm of a three-year-old playing in a garden or an evening of banter among a few friends. It isn't that they are sentimental and naive, precisely the opposite: because they have seen how hard things can get, they know how to draw the full value from the peaceful and the sweet- whenever and wherever these arise.

3. Folly

The wise know that all human beings, themselves included, are deeply sunk in folly: we have irrational desires and incompatible aims, we are unaware of ourselves, we are prone to mood swings, we are visited by all kinds of fantasies and delusions - and are always buffeted by the curious demands of our sexuality. The wise are unsurprised by the our ongoing co-existence of deep immaturity and perversity alongside quite ãdül† qualities like intelligence and morality. They know that we are barely evolved apes. Aware that at least half of life is irrational, they try - wherever possible - to budget for madness and are slow to panic when it (reliably) rears its head. The wise take the business of laughing at themselves seriously. They hedge their pronouncements, they are sceptical in their conclusions. Their certainties are not as brittle as those of others. They laugh from the constant collisions between the noble way they'd like things to be, and the demented way they in fact often turn out.

4. Politeness

The wise are realistic about social relations, in particular, about how difficult it is to change people's minds and have an effect on their lives. They are therefore extremely reticent about telling people too frankly what they think. They have a sense of how seldom it is useful to get censorious with others. They want - above all - that things be nice between people, even if this means they are not totally authentic. So they will sit with someone of an opposite political persuasion and not try to convert them; they will hold their tongue at someone who seems to be announcing a wrong-headed plan for reforming the country, educating their child or directing their personal life. They'll be aware of how differently things can look through the eyes of others and will search more for what people have in common than what separates them.

5. Self-Acceptance

The wise have made their peace with the yawning gap between how they would ideally want to be and what they are actually like. They have come to terms with their idiocies, flaws, ugliness, limitations and drawbacks. They are not ashamed of themselves – and therefore, don’t have to lie or dissemble in front of others. Without self-love or vanity, they can give those close to them a fairly accurate map of their neuroses and faults and of the reasons why they will be hard to live around (and therefore, often, they aren’t such difficult companions).

6. Forgiveness

The wise are realistic about other people. They recognise the extraordinary pressures everyone is under to pursue their own ambitions, defend their interests and seek their own pleasures. It can make others appear extremely 'mean' and purposefully evil, but this would be to over-personalise the issue. The wise know that most hurt is not intentional, it's a by-product of the constant collision of blind competing egos in a world of scarce resources. The wise are therefore slow to anger and judge. They don't leap to the worst conclusions about what is going on in the minds of others. They will be readier to forgive from a proper sense of how difficult every life is: harbouring as it does so many frustrated ambitions, disappointments and longings. The wise appreciate the pressures people are under. Of course they shouted, of course they were rude, naturally they want to overtake... The wise are generous to the reasons for which people might not be nice. They feel less persecuted by the aggression and meanness of others, because they have a sense of where it comes from: a place of hurt.

7. Resilience

The wise have a solid sense of what they can survive. They know just how much can go wrong and things will still be - just about -liveable. The unwise person draws the boundaries of their contentment far too far out; so that it encompasses, and depends upon, fame, money, personal relationships, popularity, health... The wise person sees the advantages of all of these, but also knows that they may- before too long, at a time of fate's choosing have to draw the borders right back and find contentment within a more bounded space.

8. Envy

The wise realise that there are some good reasons why they don't have many of the things they really want. They look at the tycoon or the star and have a decent grasp of why they didn't ever make it to that level. It looks like just an accident, an unfair one, but there were in fact some logical grounds: they didn't work as hard. they don't have anything like the drive or mental capacity... At the same time, the wise see that some destinies are truly shaped by nothing more than accident. Some people are promoted randomly. Some people have the right parents. The wise appreciate the role of luck and don't curse themselves overly at those junctures where they have evidently not had as much of it as they would have liked. The wise are also realistic about the consequences of succeeding. It doesn't make you completely happy. They know how much we remain tethered to some basic dynamics in our personalities, whatever the job or income. This is both cautionary (for those who succeed) and hopeful (for those who won't). The wise see the continuities across those two categories over-emphasised by modern consumer capitalism: 'success' and 'failure'.

9. Regrets

In our ambitious age, it is common to begin
with dreams of being able to pull off an unblemished life, where one can hope to get the major decisions - in love and work-right. But the wise realise that it is impossible to fashion a spotless life; one will make some extremely large and utterly uncorrectable errors in a number of areas. Perfectionism is a wicked illusion. Regret is unavoidable. But regret lessens the more we see that error is endemic across the species. One can't look at anyone's life story without seeing some devastating mistakes etched across it These errors are not coincidental but structural, they arise because we all lack the information we need to make choices in time-sensitive situations. We are all, where it counts, steering almost blind.

10. Calm

So much of our culture is directed to stimulating
and exciting us. The wise know that turmoil is always around the corner - and they have come to fear and sense its approach. That's why they nurture such a strong commitment to calm. A quiet evening feels like an achievement. A day without anxiety is something to be celebrated. They are not afraid of having a somewhat
boring time. Things could be so much worse - and certainly will again. The wise see calm as a skill - a learned quality, not a lucky gift of temperament. They take note of the things that quieten them: watching the clouds move across the sky, going for a walk, reading about disasters that occurred long ago or observing the buds on a tree. They like things that invite a radically different perspective and can thus make their own troubles feel less impressive: mountains, pictures of deserts, ants ferrying some crumbs across a paving stone. They don't just wait for chance to bring such things to their attention: they plan for serenity, when they can.

11. Sane insanity

The wise understand that we are all somewhat mad and therefore that what we should aim for is not sanity, but a wise, knowledgeable and self-possessed relationship to our manifold insanities, or what can be termed 'sane insanity. The sane insane differ from the simply insane by virtue of the honest and accurate grasp they have on what is not entirely right with them. They may not be wholly balanced, but they don't have the additional folly of insisting on their normalcy. They can admit with good grace - and no particular loss of dignity - that of course they are rather peculiar at a myriad of points. They lay bare the fears, doubts, longings, desires and habits that don't belong to the story we like to tell ourselves about sanity. They warn others as far as possible in advance of what being around them might involve and apologise promptly for their failings as soon as they have manifested themselves. They offer their friends and companions accurate maps to their craziness, which is about the most generous thing one can to anyone who has to endure us. The sane-insane among us are not a special category of the mentally unwell: they represent the most evolved possibility for a mature human being.

12. Selfishness

We're highly attuned to the notion that being selfish is one of the worst character traits we might possess and yet the wise know that some of the reason we fail to have the lives we should springs from an excess of the very opposite trait: from too much modesty, from a counter-productive lack of selfishness. We are at risk because we collectively fail to distinguish between good and bad versions of selfishness. The good, desirable kind involves the courage to give priority to ourselves and our concerns at particular points; the confidence to be forthright about our needs, not in order to harm or conclusively reject other people, but in order to serve them in a deeper, more sustained and committed way over the long term. For example, in order to be a good parent, we may need to have an hour to ourselves every day. We may need to take a long time in a hot ****** to mull over events. We may need to do something that seems a bit indulgent, like life drawing or a clarinet lesson. The wisely selfish person isn't greedy: they're rightly worried of frittering away their best potential. And they know that a lack of selfishness can turn us, slowly, into highly disagreeable as well as ineffective people.

13. Worldliness

The wise know a lot about the unvarnished truths of human nature: how angry, mean, resentful and daft we all are. They have sufficiently acclimatised themselves to the reality of what people are like not to need to censor others, deliver moralistic judgements or get bitter. And they have done this not primarily through books, but by being courageous about knowing their own nature. They may not share our fantasies exactly, but they accept that their own are as colourful and as complex. They don't have our precise anxieties, but they know well enough the powerful and peculiar fears that hold us all hostage. They are comforting to be around because they have an accurately broad grasp of what it means to be normal- which is, of course, so far from what we insist on pretending is normal. They don't require us to be conventionally good or typical to shore up their fragile sense of self or of reality. Their only requirement is that we admit without too much defensiveness, to some of what is really going on inside us. And they'll do the same for us in turn.

14. Compassion

The wise don't hold a grudge for too long. Of course, they have been badly let down by certain people in the past. We all have. The natural response is blame. But the eventual, mature reaction (building on an understanding of how our own flaws arose) is to interpret people's harmful behaviour as a consequence of certain of their sorrows and disappointments. The people who damaged us almost invariably didn't quite mean to do so; they were themselves hurt and struggling to endure. We can develop a sad but more compassionate picture of a world in which sorrows and anxieties are blindly passed down the generations. The insight isn't only true to experience, holding it in mind will mean there is less to fear. Those who wounded us were not superior, impressive beings who knew our special weaknesses and justly targeted them. They were themselves highly frantic, damaged creatures trying their best to cope with the litany of private sorrows to which every life condemns us.

15. Self-Knowledge

When asked to sum up the essential counsel of philosophy, Socrates - widely thought of as the wisest man in the ancient world - was said to have responded with just two words: 'Know yourself.'

If self-knowledge is central to a wise and fulfilled life, it is because it helps render our peculiar minds somewhat less unpredictable, perplexing and unreliable in their operations. With a measure of self-knowledge, we learn to know which of our many often contradictory feelings and plans we might trust. We can be a little more sceptical around our first impulses and less puzzled by the ebb and flow of our moods. We understand where some of our feelings have come from and what might be driving our convictions and our longings. We have a way to explain our antics to others - offering them reassurance, warning and (at points) more eloquent pleas for forgiveness. Self-knowledge can correct the customary vagueness of our thoughts, converting our prejudices into arguments, and our hunches into communicable ideas. It is what enables us to keep a record of some of what flows through consciousness and to exert a measure of control over our emotions. Not least, knowing ourselves renders us slightly more interesting to be around, for we can better communicate what it feels like to be us.

16. Skepticism

In Greece in the 3rd century BC, a group of philosophers known as the sceptics (from the Greek word skepsis, meaning questioning or examination) devoted themselves to showing up how flawed and unreliable our minds can be, in large and small ways. These organs are, they insisted, endemically prone to error, distortion, omission and false judgement. The sceptics were trying to warn us of the dangers of misplaced confidence – and urging us to adopt a more cautious approach to much of what we think and feel. Our most passionate conclusions and rock-solid certainties can turn out to be mere chimeras. The instrument through which we interpret reality, our 1260 or so cubic centimetres of brain matter, has a treacherous proclivity for throwing out faulty readings. Knowing this, and never letting it far from our awareness, was for the Sceptics the beginning of trying to live well and wisely. Understanding that we may be repeatedly hoodwinked by our own minds is the start of the only kind of intelligence of which, for the sceptics, we’re really capable. There are no greater fools than those who never suspect they might be ones.

17. Melancholy

Melancholy is not rage or bitterness, it is a wise species of sadness that arises when we are open to the fact that life is inherently difficult for everyone and that suffering and disappointment are at the heart of human experience. It is not a disorder that needs to be cured; it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate acknowledgement of how much pain we must inevitably all travel through. The wisdom of the melancholy attitude (as opposed to the bitter or angry one) lies in the understanding that we have not been singled out, that our suffering belongs to humanity in general. Melancholy is redolent with an impersonal take on suffering. It is filled with pity for the human condition. There are melancholy landscapes and melancholy pieces of music, melancholy poems and melancholy times of day. In them, we find echoes of our own griefs, returned back to us without some of the personal associations that, when they first struck us, made them particularly agonising. The task of wisdom is to turn rage and fake joy into melancholy. The more melancholy a person can be, the less they need to be persecuted by their own failures, lost illusions and regrets.

18. Simplicity

The unwise love complexity. They associate intelligence with fancy words and near incomprehensibility. But the wise know that many of the central truths have an elemental simplicity to them; they have some of the innocent plainness of a parable. To hear that we should understand rather than condemn, that others are primarily anxious rather than mean, that every strength of character we admire bears with it a weakness we must forgive; these are at once very basic and very deep notions. Simplicity should never insult our intelligence; it should remind us to be down-to-earth in our understanding of what real cleverness is like. We need to be sophisticated enough not to reject a truth because it sounds like something we already know. We need to be mature enough to bend down and pick up governing ideas even when they come in the simplest guises. We need to remain open to vast truths that can be stated in the language of a child.

19. Vulnerability

The wise know how to take off their armour and show others who they really are, even in their less impressive sides. They risk revealing their errors, weakness, sorrows and failures – and they do so primarily to invite others to reveal something of their own versions of these things. They do it to foster friendship. We’re only scratching the surface of another person until they let us see what they’re ashamed of, sorry for and unusually troubled by – until, that is, they expose something of how they suffer. And for that to happen, the wise person will willingly take the first, tentative, limited, but powerful, step. They are less awkward because they know that – however impressive the outward disguise – the other person inevitably has many things they would like to be more open about too, if only they could be sure they would meet with a compassionate and tender response.

20. Dishonesty

The wise know that sometimes, for the very best of motives, it is acceptable – and even necessary – to lie. They don’t worship being truthful above the imperative to be kind. So at points, they will hold back from saying in thorough detail what is truly on their minds. They will say something that is merely (and very gently) polite to ensure that a person does not have to suffer unduly from their slightly cynical or ungenerous insights. They know that a small local truth might utterly obscure a more important larger fact and should be kept back on that account. Telling someone their new haircut is really quite horrible might annihilate a fact of far greater significance: that we deeply appreciate and admire their nature. Or if we candidly say that their opinions on politics are stupid and ill-informed, we run a risk of not being able to make them understand how much we love them in other ways. To the wise person, polite manners are not superficial and outmoded conventions: they are crucial guides to handling the naturally fragile and complex minds of others. And the wise person hopes that, from time to time, others will – out of true generosity – lie to them a little in turn.

 

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