REALITY IN THE WISDOM PARADOX

I've said this before on Wrights Lane, but the more I read and the more I hear, the more I realize I don’t know much about anything. Or at least I don’t know many things with any degree of certainty. Although I think I'm getting there and sometimes surprise myself with the certainty of the things that come out of my mouth in a reactionary form of self expression.

Perhaps that comes with age and lots of experience.

But the point I want to make is that the less we know, the more certain we are. For young people the world is black and white. There’s a definitive answer for everything. Certitude is a given. Over-confidence oozes from every pore. “Maybes”, “Possiblys” and “It depends” are reserved for non-commital wimps.

To the most uninformed, the world is binary:
Yes / No
Love / Hate
Agree / Disagree
For / Against

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge...”— Charles Darwin

The Internet...has taken us further away from that illumination, or wisdom, that is essential to living a life that matters.

To the greener minds of the world, answers to anything you want to know are somewhere, you just have to find the right search engine or the right person who can offer the definitive answer. Depending on the question they’re trying to answer, the process can leave them pretty frustrated…

The cure lies in what I call “the wisdom paradox."

I was first exposed to the wisdom paradox some time ago when I was privy to a personal story that went something like this:

"At age 35, when I went back to school to add another major to my undergraduate degree, my sports psychology instructor said to me one day that she very much appreciated having a mature student in her class. A bit taken aback, I asked her why. She said [I’m paraphrasing here] 'I appreciate the fact that you know there isn’t a definitive answer to every question. You know that it depends, along with whatever information qualifies it, is a reasonable answer. To students right out of high school, that's not good enough. For them there has to be a definitive answer to everything'.”

"That comment has stuck with me for years now. At the time, I hadn’t yet come to appreciate how my mind had changed from opinionated teenager to wondering—or is it wandering—adult," she added with a touch of humor at her own expense.

The more you learn, the more you are open to what you don't know.

The wisdom paradox tells us that the more we’re exposed to thoughts, points of view, new situations, cultures, ideas, and facts, the more we appreciate just how ignorant we are and that the ways to see the world are virtually infinite.

But don’t worry. There is a payoff to that infectious feeling of cluelessness. There’s power hidden in it. That power rests in the lack of assumptions:

• We stop assuming there’s an easy answer.
• We ask more questions.
• We listen more intently to fully appreciate and understand a point of view. 
• We realize that anyone and everyone can be a teacher.
• We tend to dismiss comparisons among individuals as irrelevant or at least of little use.
• We’re comfortable exploring a fuzzy topic, knowing full well we might never get to the bottom of it.

“Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.”— Alice Miller

Finally, we’re more empathetic because empathy is difficult—if not impossible—when we assume others think and see the world like we do. And, most assuredly, they do not

And so, I continue to bask in my incompetence, in my recognized deficiencies, in my ineptitude, knowing full well that, with every book I read, speech I hear, conversation I engage in, exposure to my own lack of knowledge grows and in proportion to it, my curiosity. With curiosity comes knowledge which begets conviction when applied diligently and in the right way.

I’ve learned to appreciate this level of awareness because it means that, just as a good thriller can, the curiosity that results will always make me want to turn the page.

And with it, ideally, something new that I hadn't known before.

When I talk or write convincingly with reasoned passion, rest assured it was born out of initial ignorance and it has been processed through the wisdom paradox mill at least a time or two.