#being wholly unaware of the complexities of life and living is kind of comparable to the fake existence of the lm holograms to me

[bonewicca]

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[ahappyevent]

The school of life, an emotional education by Alain de Botton

The last few pages of the book. On Wisdom.

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WISDOM

To teach us hot to be wise is the underlying central purpose of philosophy. The word may sound abstract and lofty, but wisdom is something we might plausibly aim to acquire a little more of over the course of our lives, even if true wisdom requires that we always keep in mind the persistent risk of madness and error.

Wisdom can be said to comprise twelve ingredients.

Realism

The wise are, first and foremost, ‘realistic’ about how challenging many things can be. They are fully 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 ambition, but it makes them more steadfast, calmer and less prone to panic about the problems that will invariably come their way. The wise rarely expect anything to be wholly easy or to go entirely well.

Appreciation

Properly aware that much can and will go wrong, the wise are unusually alive to moments of calm and beauty, even extremely modest ones, of the kind that those with grander plans rush past. With the dangers and tragedies of existence firmly in mind, they can 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 intimate conversations among friends. It isn’t that they are sentimental and naive; in fact, 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 they arise.

Folly

The wise know that all human beings, themselves included, are never far from folly. They have irrational desires and incompatible aims, they are unaware of a lot of what they feel, they are prone to mood swings, they are visited by powerful fantasies and delusions - and are always buffeted by the curios demands of their sexuality. The wise are unsurprised by the ongoing coexistence of deep immaturity and perversity alongside quite adult qualities like intelligence and morality. They know that we are barely evolved apes. Aware that at least half of life is irrational, they try - whenever possible - to budget for madness and are slow to panic when it (reliably) rears its head.

Humor

The wise take the business of laughing at themselves seriously. They hedge their pronouncements and are sceptical in their conclusions. Their certainties are not as brittle as those of others. They laugh from the constant collision between the noble way they’d like things to be and the demented way they inn fact often turn out.

Politness

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 other too frankly what they think. They have a sense of how seldom it is useful to get censorious with others. They want, above all, things to be nice in social settings, 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 with 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 other and will search more for what people have in common that for what separates them.

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 tendencies to idiocy, ugliness and error.  They are not fundamentally ashamed of themselves because they have already shed so much of their pride.

Forgiveness

The wise are comparably realistic about other people. They recognise the extraordinary pressure everyone is under to pursue their own ambitions, defend their own interest and seek their own pleasures. It can make others appear extremely mean and purposefully evil, but this would be to overpersonalize the issue. The wise know that most hurt is not intentional but 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 overlook a hurt from a proper sense of how difficult every life is, harbouring as it does so many frustrated ambitions, disappointments and longings. Of course they shouted, of course they were rude, of course they wanted to appear slightly more important … the wise are generous as to the reasons why people might not be nice. They feel less persecuted by aggression and meanness of others, because they have a sense of the place of hurt those feelings come from.

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 confined space.

Envy

The wise don’t envy idly, realising 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 weren’t able to succeed at this level. It seems like just an accident, an unfair one, but there were in fact some logical reasons.

At the same time the wise see that some destinies are truly shaped by nothing more than accident. Some people are promoted randomly. Companies that aren’t especially deserving can suddenly make it big. Som people have the right parents. The winners aren’t all noble and good. The wise appreciate the role of luck and don’t cure themselves overly at this junctures where they have evidently not had as much of it as they would have liked.

Success and failure

The wise emerge as realistic about the consequences of winning and succeeding. They may want to win as much as the next person, but they are aware of how many fundamentals will remain unchanged, whatever the outcome. They don’t exaggerate the transformations available to us. They know how much we remain tethered to some basic dynamics in our personalities, whatever job we have or material possession we acquire. This is both cautionary (for those who succeed) and hopeful (for those who won’t). The wise see the continuities between the two categories overemphasised by modern consumer capitalism: success and failure.

Regrets

In our ambitious age, it is common to begin with dreams if 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. We 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 species. We 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.

Calm

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. There could, and will again, be so much worse.

And finally, of course, the wise know that it will never be possible to be wise every hour, let alone every day, of their lives.

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It might daunt you my girls as sad or pessimistic or outrageous. I have mixed feelings as well, but then again I think we all do, towards most things in life.

I can only hope that one day you (and me) will not see it as such. Definitely a book I recommend you read, probably a few times throughout your life, probably starting somewhere in your mid 20s and then again every 10 years :) I know I’ve set my alarm in 10 years to re-read it.

Love, mama.