Wisdom

We do not receive wisdom. We must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

It's something I've been meditating on this morning. As I stare out at the ocean, onto the mountains, I truly think on this. Wisdom is such a delicate thing, a delicate “mode” to speak on.

Because wisdom, in my lived experience, has been garnered through truth and the capacity to hold multiple truths without it shattering you. And I think that's what I believe Proust to be saying when he says, to “spare us”. Because wisdom isn't just your truth or their truth. For “the truth” is the ability to hold the duality, and it is the wisdom that you garner through that capacity.

A very small example, but poignant and or modern, very modern example. Kobe Bryant, he's the best basketball player to have ever played. Or rather, one of the greatest; and that is undeniable by his peers, by the world. He is undeniably the best.

Kobe Bryant raped a woman… a woman said she was raped.

Both of those things are true.

Two things that contradict each other. Two things that do not seem to go together. Two things that you would want to divorce, for one thing could assert makes the other less. Things that we find to be the hidden parts of ourselves, the “secret self”, the things that we find to be that in which we “should be ashamed” or should be ashamed.

But wisdom, it's the ability to hold both. and to not allow your emotional life to touch either. Because you could say, “oh, Kobe Bryant's not that great, because I'm a blah, blah, blah fan.”

Or “Kobe Bryant didn't do that, that woman was mentally ill.

Those are your opinion, and so the quest to obtain wisdom, to garner wisdom [one must over come themselves].

Wisdom is the journey to hold multiple truths without judgment, fear, desire.

It is perhaps for me and my lived experience the quest for wisdom has been one of and is continuously the greatest and most beautifully painful journeys that one can go on in life.

Because to see truth and not allow it to shatter you, in and of itself is a quest.

Can you maintain? Can you observe? Can you endure? Can you garner information without prejudice, desire, joy, pain, hate, without highs and lows, but the absorbing of information?

[What is ] True? Factual, and from the source information for then to hold those truths even contradictory, from your emotional life desire to be different.

Can you hold them? And that is  - it's a journey no one can spare you from; if the journey you seek is wisdom. That's what I've been meditating on this morning.