We're Experts AND Dumbasses, Smart BUT NOT Wise

     When being honest with ourselves, we'll admit that despite - & to a large extent, because of - all we know about our particular health-care role, we sadly lack wisdom. We've spent so much time & energy cramming info into our heads, trying to appear smart, that we don't even understand the concept of wisdom, never mind living wisely.

     Wisdom is “a developmental process involving self-transcendence. Self-transcendence refers to the ability to move beyond self-centered consciousness, and to see things as they are with clear awareness of human nature and human problems, and with a considerable measure of freedom from biological and social conditioning. This ability to move beyond a self-centered perspective is certainly an important component of wisdom.
     Transcending the self is needed to move beyond ingrained, automatic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, and to connect empathetically with the experiences of others.”
        Le TN, Levenson MR. Wisdom as self-transcendence: What's love (& individualism) got to do with it? Journal of Research in Personality 2005; 39(4): 443-457.

     "wise individuals evince less despair and greater equanimity because they (are) more likely to grapple with existential dilemmas and paradoxes that give life more meaning."
       Le TN. Life satisfaction, openness value, self-transcendence, and wisdom. Journal of Happiness Studies 2011; 12(2): 171-182. 

     "When we truly live each moment, what happens to the burden of life? ... If we are totally what we are, in every second, we begin to experience life as joy. Standing between us and a life of joy are our thoughts, our ideas, our expectations, and our hopes and fears.
      ... people who have been practicing for some time begin to have a sense of humor about their burden. After all, the thought that life is a burden is only a concept. We're simply doing what we're doing, second by second by second. The measure of fruitful practice is that we feel life less as a burden and more as a joy."
        Beck CJ. Nothing special: Living Zen. HarperCollins, 1995.

     Mindfulness practice is a well-established, intentional path from suffering towards wisdom, equanimity and joy.

A Weed Grows in Venice

 

Can We Really Know Anyone - even Ourself?

     A senior meditation teacher once advised: "Only don't know."

     A definition of expert: "One who's incapable of learning."

     "The Renaissance is all about secret transformations. Human beings - we're not objects, we're not things. We are alive & changing every minute. Our very nature is change. Our very nature is transformation - which we forget, because we say "Oh that person is like that." And we forget they're like that today, but they could be like something else tomorrow, and maybe they were something else two weeks ago. 
     We keep actually putting labels on people and typing them. And in fact the one thing about human beings is that we're quicksilver, endlessly transforming and changeable." 

     Peter Sellars, American theatre director, interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio:
     http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Ideas/ID/2442656684/

Corner Store, Rome, Italy

 

The Freedom of Real Education

     "If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and who and what is really important, if you want to operate on your default setting, then you like me probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable.
     But if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation, as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars. Love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
     Not that mystical oneness is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of real education.                                       David Foster Wallace

      Wallace's entire 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech (below) is WELL worth 22 minutes of your time.