Childhood ideals will last a lifetime unless some internal or external agent challenges them. And when they’re challenged, it can hurt. Like a child’s security blanket, our ideals cover up insecurities, uncertainties and uncomfortable truths we’d rather avoid, forever if possible. Remove the ideals, and the insecurity, uncertainty and discomfort are exposed. As adults, we have the capacity to handle the truth, but how we resist the loss of innocence. The bliss of ignorance.

But there’s an upside that makes growing up a pretty sweet proposition. In place of our lost innocence, in the empty void that remains when a childish ideal is exposed as false, there is a movement toward clarity and objective perception. We grasp a bit more of reality as it is, not as we want it to be. Our awareness and perspective grow wider. We become a little more wise.

I once, not so long ago, naively believed that wisdom is a natural process that every adult readily attains through common sense and life experience. That lovely, hot chocolate childhood ideal lies also at my feet, shattered into pieces.

In place of that ideal emerged the sobering truth that the entire human race suffers from a kind of wisdom deficit disorder. Of epidemic proportions. I look and look, and only see tiny pockets of it here and there. In the places where wisdom is needed most, it is the most absent.

Where is the Wisdom?, I asked in my last post. But the question I’m really interested in is:

What is wisdom and how do we cultivate it?

A good starting point is to uncover why we’re not wise. Well, here’s one: the lack of clarity, objectivity, honesty and clear perception.

Human minds have a tremendous capacity for story telling. We tell ourselves all kinds of stories that we accept as truth, and we have the intellect to rationalize and justify them. How much of what we believe to be true seems true because we want it to be true? How dangerous is that?

Perhaps one reason for our wisdom deficit disorder is the fact that we’re not very interested in the truth. Yes, it’s inarguable that "we can’t handle the truth," but we are also quite inconvenienced by it. The truth, if we are even willing to perceive it, thwarts our interests again and again. It refuses to support our wishes, hopes, dreams, preferences, desires and sentiments.

Yet it is our very attachment to these things that make us unwise (and at times really stupid). Without clarity, without objectivity and a willingness to continuously expand our perspective, we cannot be wise. Though we refuse to accept it, truth really is in our best interest.

My favorite Platonic dialogue is the Gorgias, in which Socrates asks, "is it better to be an orator, who professes to know the truth and tries to convince everyone else of it; or is it better to be a philosopher, who knows he may not know the truth, but spends his whole life seeking it?"

The real beauty of the Gorgias is Socrates’ description of the philosopher:

A lover of truth who is willing to be wrong in order to be clear.

This is my first understanding of wisdom and how to cultivate it.