Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippett
Many of the books of non-fiction I read are incredible because of whom the authors have read and whom they are pointing you to read next. In the case of Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Art and Mystery of Living, Krista Tippett hasn’t just read the authors, mystics, scientists, activists, poets, she engages. She’s actually spoken with them, and has done so over decades.
The result is an amazing book. Krista tells some of her own story as she walks us through a journey in the mystery and art of living by contemplating words, flesh, love, faith, and hope.
Krista Tippett’s project, On Being, is a miracle and worthy of your time and attention. I recently wrote my own starter guide for the podcast. This book is its own starter guide of sorts. In each of the book’s five chapters Krista weaves her own proposal—thoughts, questions, wisdom—together with the very best distillation of wisdom from her conversation partners throughout the years. The result is consistently thought-provoking and inspiring, leading us to a better, more wise and artful humanity. I underlined on each page, notebook in hand, with the luxury of a slower, more contemplative, focused reading than I typically give my podcast listening.
She begins by zooming out on the big human questions and identifying what might be lacking in our current cultural climate.
The cultivation of inner life arose in interplay with the startling proposition that the well-being of others beyond kin and tribe-the stranger, the orphan, the outcast —was linked to one's own. Humanity gave voice to the questions that have animated religion and philosophy ever since: What does it mean to be human? What matters in a life? What matters in a death? How to be of service to each other and the world?
These questions are being reborn, reframed, in our age of interdependence with far-flung strangers. The question of what it means to be human is now inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.
What is lacking? Wisdom and virtue. On virtue, reminiscent of the way Tom Wright speaks about Christian virtue in action as a muscle trained over thousands of hours:
The connective tissue of these pages is the language of virtue-an old-fashioned word, perhaps, but one that I find is magnetic to new generations, who instinctively grasp the need for practical disciplines to translate aspiration into action. Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are not the stuff of saints and heroes, but tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I've come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.
“Virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.” Yes.
If you’ve followed my work for a while you know I reserve my 5-star ratings for books I think every human should read. This is one of them. I’ll share some of chapter 1, “Words,” to give you an idea of the book, then a few quotes that are sticking with me after having finished the book.
Before I do that I’ll say this: Our world lacks wisdom. So much of the despair we feel looking at the state of things, from the highest locations of leadership all the way down to petty arguments we have can me chalked up to a lack of wisdom, compassion, and humanity. One of the reasons I loved this book is that it invites the reader to a wiser, more generous way of being together. I think this snapshot of the first full chapter will show that.
I take it as an elemental truth of life that words matter. This is so plain that we can ignore it a thousand times a day. The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. From Genesis to the aboriginal songlines of Australia, human beings have forever perceived that naming brings the essence of things into being. The ancient rabbis understood books, texts, the very letters of certain words as living, breathing entities. Words make worlds. (15)
Her last line, “words make worlds,” is reminiscent of Heschel’s work as well as John O’Donohue’s work on blessing and our capacity to effect change with the words we choose to speak.
In terms of our aim at dealing with difference, “tolerance” is inadequate:
We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth-tolerance —to make the world we want to live in now. We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values. But tolerance doesn’t welcome.
It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment. Tolerance was a baby step to make pluralism possible, and pluralism, like every ism, holds an illusion of control. (15)
Sharing from her conversation with Rabbi Naomi Remen, she quotes her Hasidic Jewish grandfather’s storytelling:
Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is…here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It's a very important story for our times. This task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It’s the restoration of the world.
And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world. That story opens a sense of possibility. It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you. (25)
Stick with this next section. I’m sharing a longer bit because it has really captured my own imagination. There’s a 7-minute podcast episode called “Living the Questions” that captures this idea of asking good questions as its own spiritual practice. But it starts with generosity in the act of listening:
Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability, a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.
…
Generous listening in fact yields better questions. It’s not true what they taught us in school; there is such a thing as a bad question. In American life, we trade mostly in answers competing answers—-and in questions that corner, incite, or entertain. In journalism we have a love affair with the “tough” question, which is often an assumption masked as an inquiry and looking for a fight. I edited the “spiritual background of your life” question out of our produced show for years, for fear that it sounded soft, though I knew how it shaped everything that followed. My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.
If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or fall, to meet. So while a simple question can be precisely what’s needed to drive to the heart of the matter, it’s hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It’s hard to transcend a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We all have it in us to formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life-giving about asking a better question.
Here’s another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic tools: they may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on, instead. The intimate and civilizational questions we are living with in our time are not going to be answered with answers we can all make peace with any time soon.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who became my friend across time and space all those years ago in Berlin, spoke of holding questions, living questions:
Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (30)
This. This is what this book is full of. Depth in how we approach pieces of what it means to be human that leads to even greater depth on how to live right now. What could that look like?
The crack in the middle where people on both sides absolutely refuse to see the other as evil—this is where I want to live and what I want to widen. (35)
As I close, here are three more one-liners:
Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. (73)
What is love? Answer the question by telling a story of the last time you saw it (137)
All art holds the knowledge that we’re both living and dying at the saw time (148)
The On Being Project has come out with some helpful discussion guides for those who want to read and discuss as a group. This is a special book and you can binge it or take it a few days at a time—either way it will challenge you to a better humanity.