WISDOM

Having spent some time thinking about what Wisdom actually is, and how it can manifest in a person’s life, I can’t help but feel that the virtue of Wisdom is essential to a life lived to its fullest. Without wisdom, it seems like chaos would follow; without the ability to analyze the truth of a situation and make choices that take all factors into account, a person will make choices that may seem to be in his or her immediate best interest but which often lead to the destruction of a stable life for himself and for others.

I think about some of the people I’ve felt to be wise, and wonder where the world would be, and what my part in it would be, without their wisdom. I remember Martin Luther King, Jr., who acted on the truth that waiting for ideal conditions before acting only perpetuates injustice, and I hope to embody his discernment as well as his courage. I value the teachers I’ve had, like Marilee Lucke, who figured out how to let me put my inquisitive nature to work in the high school classroom and taught me the skills that led me to my present job and education, and Andrew Lamas, whose commitment to showing how spiritualities can engender social justice raised my consciousness as a scholar of religious study, pulling me out of the dusty tomes of history and tradition into the challenges of the real world. I admire people like blogger Nezua Limón Xolagrafik-Jonez, whose incisive insights into the motivations and unthinking enculturated patterns of racism have helped me begin to shed the lurking vestiges of my own racism. Without the wisdom they made manifest through action, my life and the lives of those around me might be vastly different, and not in a positive way.

Looking back at the ways I personally have manifested wisdom and folly, it is difficult to figure out the “secret” to making wise choices. One unwise decision resulted from impatience and a desire to break my habitual patterns of inertia, and another decision which I consider wise was rooted in the same soil. Perhaps wisdom cannot be examined in isolation from the other virtues; particularly important to a wise life are the virtues of Vison and Integrity. Vision allows us to better see where the choices we make are likely to lead, while integrity – while restricting our choices to those which respect our convictions and the well-being of those who surround us – makes it more likely that our choices will be, in fact, wise and well-considered. Considering these, my past actions make more sense: when I acted rashly and without vision, I made an unwise choice that led to entering an unhealthy relationship, and when I acted on impatience but in a way that respected myself and my values, I made a wise choice that got me out of that unhealthy situation. With this in mind, it stands to reason that a balanced life embodying all the virtues allows the virtues to support and uphold each other: this is the path I must strive toward in my quest for wholeness.

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