Monday 18 July 2016

The value of wisdom

Many years ago I knew a man called Kyran, a rough old bloke who lived in a terrace house in inner Melbourne. Once a week after work I’d drop in to his place and walk his two bullish Siberian huskies. An acquaintance through a friend of mine, he was in his late-60s, had developed a heart condition and needed people to help him out.

Kyran grew up during the Great Depression and Second World War and, in a full and colourful life, had been a truck driver, cane cutter, tent boxer, builders labourer and union stalwart. Like many people of his generation, he had an exterior of concrete and stone while underneath there beat a soft and caring heart.

One evening after returning his dogs from their walk I sat with him watching the TV news. A story came on about some outlaw motorcycle gang members, all leather and tattoos, brawn and scowls, appearing in court. “Pretty tough guys, eh Kyran?” I said.

“Tough! They’re not tough,” Kyran snorted in disgust, and recalled a fight he’d had with some bikies on a building site.

“I’ll tell you what’s really tough,” he suddenly said after a pause. “Seeing your kids go hungry day after day and not being able to do anything about it. That’s tough.”

I came to Kyran for homespun wisdom such as this, and it seemed to pour from him regularly. As an old man speaking to a young one he took on the persona of the elder, passing on what helpful stories and insights about life he could. I was glad to hear them, delivered in fruity and unrefined language as they often were, and felt privileged to be in his company.

In our public culture, saturated with spin, ego and the creation of false value for private gain, wisdom seems to have been largely relegated to the margins. We no longer value elders nor cultivate the kind of patience needed to hear their words. The fast, the flashy and the superficial are given highest regard.

Wisdom and instant gratification are polar opposites. It took a whole, full life to brew the kind of insight on the world that Kyran had accumulated, and there was nothing easy about it – his words had to be pondered, strained through one’s own experience and imagination.

Wisdom has that uncanny ring of truth that seems to echo through the ages; sitting with Kyran in his terrace house and listening to his stories with his dogs slumped about him I may have been round a campfire in aeons past. There was a weight of knowledge, of gravity and importance.

The truth that wisdom presents has an enduring quality, garnered from thousands of years of human experience, which pierces through all pretence. It is essentially about the good, that which lasts and nourishes life. And it has the flavour of the archetypal, of that barely perceptible realm of existence that touches the eternal.

Wisdom does not intrinsically belong to any group or section of the community, not to a particular institution or external authority, gender or age. It is available to anyone who is able to reflect on their life with depth and draw lessons aimed at the good. It is radical in that it aims for general wellbeing across all divisions created by humans – not pandering to the varieties of desire, power, greed or fear – yet it also works to establish boundaries that protect and nurture life.

In doing so it acts as a guide to living but not a prescriber of particular laws, for laws change over time but wisdom has the quality of timelessness. It may be an impetus for codes of behaviour, for cultures, institutions, social mores and movements but it cannot be reduced to them. Wisdom belongs properly to poetry than prose, and in that sense is of a more elevated if more elusive power.

In contemporary times it is fashionable to praise “disruptive” technology and practices that change established patterns in some beneficial way, but we rarely laud those that are “restorative”. Wisdom both disrupts and restores – it clears out the rubbish of false thinking while returning the mind and body to an understanding of what really matters.