“Be blessed.  And just as you are transforming your own life, may you transform the lives of those around you.  When they ask, do not forget to give.  When they knock at your door, be sure to open it.  When they lose something and come to you, do whatever you can to help them find what they have lost.  First, though, ask, knock at the door and find what is missing from your life.”*

Wisdom can be understood as what we know and who we are and the world in which we find ourselves, and our thoughts and our relationships and out behaviours all contribute to all things flourishing and thriving.

In the Genesis myth, Eve and Adam take the fruit from the tree of good and evil, or, wisdom – apparently, this was the one thing they were not supposed to do.

I find myself wondering whether this story is about how we are unable to pluck wisdom like a fruit, already formed; it has to be grown like a tree, through the kind of daily interactions described in the quote, above.

Wisdom-living is never ours in some hermetically sealed way.  Every thought, relationship, or behaviour reduces or increases the wisdom happening in our lives.

‘Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.’**

Even in the Paradise of the Genesis myth.

Wisdom – or thriving or life-in-all-its-fullness – emerges out of struggle.  It cannot be reduced to mundaneness or captured in habits and practices and self-help manuals – more attempts to pluck the fruit, more shortcuts.  By struggling to grow wisdom, we become receptive to what we do not know and cannot do, yet:

‘You were sent to the earth to become a receiver of the unknown.’^

‘The greatest quest is to make humanity human.  This will require more than knowledge, it will require wisdom.’^^

(*A Siberian shaman in Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)
(**From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^^From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)