Saving Wisdom
I read about a project where they are encouraging people to “save wisdom” by providing methods and 1,000 questions you can use as prompts to think through answers. I started reading some of the questions, and it brought me to my own question(s).
What does it mean to save wisdom? Is wisdom transferable and applicable across people? Sometimes yes, of course, but a lot of the questions I read were firmly a no. And that’s how I feel about a lot of recorded wisdom. It’s interesting to hear what worked for a person, but in that way, it’s about presenting a perspective more than it is presenting wisdom. To me, wisdom is personal and often time unknowable unless you have had the same experience. Reading about someone else’s hard-won knowledge and deep truth is very different from experiencing my own gathering of knowledge and deep truth.
I like the idea. I like the thought. But I’m not entirely sure the questions are leading us to save wisdom.
1 comment
I can see what you’re saying at my work. There are 4 people with 5 or less years of experience. And 2 of us have 30 years. The new kids hear what we’re saying but they don’t process it and take it in to their own philosophies. It’s so disheartening to answer 50 different versions of the same question and know that it’s never going to sink in because they can’t understand the wisdom. They pay lip service to being nervous when we retire. But they won’t really understand until it catches up to them in unfortunate ways.
So, no, I don’t really think you can save wisdom. On top of that, there are things that I know that I don’t know how I know them, or even *that* I know them, until they come up in a situation. How do you preserve that?
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying though!