Attaining Wisdom
Have you ever met someone who has the natural ability to assuage your fears? The gifted skill to articulate the most mundane of things? You feel you can sit next to them and listen to them dissect the world into its most fundamental parts. They help you extract pearls of wisdom from their distillation of your problems.
The gift of wisdom doesnât seem to be a gift to them. To them, it is the byproduct of an arduous journey: some turns in life they shouldnât have taken, some decisions they could have avoided, some choices they could have made better. They sit next to you and articulate with such finesse that you ponder why you couldnât do it for so long.
Wisdom cannot be chased; it can only be attained by walking the least chosen pathway. It all starts with you collecting information from the world. You observe your surroundings. You base your opinions on the experiences borne out of the environment. Your fear, your courage, your insecurity, your madnessâall come from the information your brain has collected over a long period of time.
There comes a transition in everyoneâs life where we learn the machinations of the world: how it functions, how your life can be shaped, and how you can survive with all the information you have collected. You gain knowledge when you learn how to make sense of all the information around you. This knowledge includes the skills you adopt, the people you help with those skills, and the changes you bring to society and the world.
When your environment becomes stale, when it fails to instill any sense of accomplishment, when you are worried that your knowledge has vanished, you dig a hole and dive deeper into that void. You go beyond information, experiences, and knowledge. You fill the void with the perennial questionââwhy.â
It is when you discover the âwhyâ behind your existence, when you discover the âwhyâ behind anything in the world, that you have truly achieved wisdom. You can be quite successful with âWhatâ and âHow,â but you cannot be content until you find your âwhy.â So when you remember the person who could articulate the simplest experience in a poetic fashion, know that they have dug way deeper.
Such is the travesty that you cannot begin with the âwhyâ; it only comes at the end of knowledge. Itâs the ultimate end of your journey because it is there you learn why anything works the way it does. That is wisdom. It lies at the end of knowledge. Wisdom is a step closer to God.