Wisdom

Victor Davis Hanson asks,

Is there not wisdom in being able to drop an 80-foot pine tree with a chain saw within a foot of the mark, or to take apart a hydraulic ram in an hour, or to steer a bulldozer on a narrow uphill road? Can MSNBC news reader Brian Williams tell the truth any better than the Michigan lathe operator? Is Lois Lerner, formerly of the IRS and now enjoying a multimillion-dollar retirement, more likely to file an honest tax return than the Wyoming rancher, or would you feel safer knowing that Press Secretary Josh Earnest was working on a high-voltage wire outside your front door?

Or is wisdom sometimes gained by losing the polish on one’s hands? Is the wrinkled man’s face as trustworthy as the thirty-something’s peach fuzz or the Botox grin of the middle-aged metrosexual on the evening news or the pollster who assures you that the election has already been decided before the voting? In this year of weariness with the elite and their definition of success and wisdom, lots of such questions are being asked.

...What good did grifting for all those hundreds of millions of dollars do for the Clintons in their sunset years? Do they look healthier and haler for their frenzied pursuit of lucre? Did they gain greater respect and acclaim, the richer they became, or are they resting in peace with the assurance of lives well lived? Are they finally deemed successful for scamming that last $50 million in their pay-for-play scheming?

Trump is criticized now that he might be too soft on Putin. Perhaps. Yet it was not Trump, but the Ivy League Trinity of Obama, Clinton, and Kerry who “reset” George W. Bush’s reset sanctions against Putin, who canceled already-planned missile defense with the Czechs and the Poles; it was Clinton who pushed a ridiculous plastic reset button; and Obama who in a hot-mic quip stealthily promised Dmitry Medvedev that he would be more reasonable with Vladimir Putin after his reelection, who invited the Russians into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus, who mocked Mitt Romney when the latter suggested that Russia was a threat to America, who loudly announced faux “step-over” line ultimatums to the Russians; it was Clinton who in pay-for-play greed opened up North American uranium resources to the Russians, and Obama who personally mocked Putin as an adolescent school cut-up even as he appeased Putin at every turn.

For now, Donald Trump has proved that the animal cunning necessary to survive in the jungle of Manhattan real estate — duplicitous and venal politicians, all-powerful unions, incompetent and vindictive regulators, fair-weather bankers and investors, and dozens of special-interest crusaders — trumps the definition of traditional political wisdom: finding a young hip graduate from the right school with the right résumé to hire the right people to run the right sort of campaign. Trump instinctively sensed that to win, Republicans would have to recapture the Rust Belt states, and to do that, he would have to campaign on illegal immigration, jobs, trade, and the economy.

If “Make America Great Again” is not to end up like the banal “Hope and Change,” if the Republican Congress of 2017 is not to wither away like the Democratic Congress of 2009, and if the glitzy promises of 2016 are not to prove as empty as the deceptions of Obamacare, the Iran Deal, the stimulus, and “balancing the budget,” then Trump will have to reflect on the nature of true wisdom: Trust instinct as much as conventional wisdom, never forget who elects the politician, remember that cheap praise is fickle and transient and those who traffic in it disappear in extremis, quietly do what is promised to those who were promised a change, ignore the venom of critics, and do not gloat over successes — and move silently, quickly, and, above all, modestly.

Do all that, and Trump would prove wiser than the more erudite who hate him.

Read more here.

Finding our way

h/t Bookworm

Wisdom

What can we learn from our competitors? Seth Godin takes a look.

Learning from history is cheap. And worth it.

What are the five best decisions your competitor or your predecessor made last year?

Not only because they worked, but because they showed you a new way of thinking, something that went against your instincts or biases...

Every political candidate ought to be able to outline the five lessons learned from the men and women who came before--especially the positive things they've learned from those in other parties. Those unwilling or unable to do so are either demagogues or ignorant.

Every job candidate ought to be able to outline the five lessons learned from the leaders they've worked with previously. Those unwilling or unable to do so are not paying attention.

The number one thing to steal from your competitors: Wisdom.

"It is often from the weakest among us that we learn wisdom."

Steven Ertelt wrote this on September 9 at Life News:

Abortion survivor Gianna Jessen led off a Congressional hearing today looking into evidence that the Planned Parenthood abortion business sells aborted babies and their body parts. During the hearing, Jessen shared her story of surviving a saline abortion.

Jessen shared her very moving and compelling story of surviving an abortion:

My biological mother was seven and a half months pregnant when she went to Planned Parenthood, who advised her to have a late-term saline abortion. This method of abortion burns the baby inside and out, blinding and suffocating the child, who is then born dead, usually within 24 hours.

Instead of dying, after 18 hours of being burned in my mother’s womb, I was delivered alive in an abortion clinic in Los Angeles on April the 6th, 1977. (See photo of my medical records.) My medical records state: “Born alive during saline abortion” at 6 am. Thankfully, the abortionist was not at work yet. Had he been there, he would have ended my life with strangulation, suffocation, or leaving me there to die. Instead, a nurse called an ambulance, and I was rushed to a hospital. Doctors did not expect me to live.

I did. I was later diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, which was caused by a lack of oxygen to my brain while surviving the abortion. I was never supposed to hold my head up or walk. I do. And Cerebral Palsy is a great gift to me. I was eventually placed in foster care and later adopted. I forgive my biological mother. Within the first year after my birth , I was used as an expert witness in a case where an abortionist had been caught strangling a child to death after being born alive.

Since I am typing this on an outdated computer at the library, I cannot post the video of Gianna Jessen's powerful testimony before Congress, but you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHnaQiOxGfg

...The expose’ videos catching Planned Parenthood officials selling the body parts of aborted babies have shocked the nation. Here is a list of all nine:

In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.
In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.
In the fourth video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde stated, “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”
In the fifth video: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasted of Planned Parenthood’s skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”
In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”
In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.”
In the eighth video: StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits Planned Parenthood sells “a lot of” fully intact aborted babies.
The ninth video: catches a Planned Parenthood medical director discussing how the abortion company sells fully intact aborted babies — including one who “just fell out” of the womb.

Read more here.

Wisdom. What is it? How do we get it? How do we foster it?

At Big Questions Online Margaret Plews-Ogan wrote,

When researcher Judith Glück and colleagues asked subjects to describe a situation in which they acted wisely, compared to a peak experience, they found that the wisdom situations more often involved difficult or negative events, implying that wisdom perhaps develops through the experience of adversity. Pascual Leone and colleagues described these challenging situations as “ultimate limit situations,” circumstances that “cannot be undone and are nonetheless faced with consciousness and resolve…situations like death, illness, aging, …absolute failure…uncontrollable fear.” Psychologists Tedeschi and Calhoun have been studying this positive response to trauma for the past ten years, a phenomenon they call post-traumatic growth. We’ve all heard of post-traumatic stress, but these researchers noted that when asked about how trauma might have changed them for the better, people began to describe the positive ways in which they had changed because of what they had lived through. This complex set of changes fall into five domains: increased appreciation of life, warmer relations with others, recognition of new possibilities for one’s life, a greater sense of personal strength, and spiritual development.

Tedeschi and Calhoun suggest that trauma induces a disruption in our understanding of ourselves and the world (our schema) and that disruption forces us to re-work our understanding of ourselves and the world, resulting in learning and growth with the potential for wisdom as the final result. In the Wisdom in Medicine project we were interested in this question of whether moving through a difficult circumstance in a positive way can result in wisdom. We studied patients who had coped with chronic pain, and physicians who had made a serious medical error. When asked what they had learned and how they had changed for the better because of their experience, they used the language of wisdom. They talked about having increased compassion for others, increased capacity for forgiveness and humility, an increased desire to understand things, but also a deeper understanding of the ambiguous nature of things, and becoming more aware of the limitations of our knowledge.

Of course, not everyone who suffers through a difficult experience comes out with something positive. In fact, you could argue, adversity is just as likely to make someone bitter, angry, cynical and entrenched as it is to make them compassionate, humble, more able to see things from other’s perspectives. So I will argue that it is not just adversity, but rather adversity plus the right matrix and the inner capacity to use that difficult experience in a positive way that leads to wisdom.

We asked the Wisdom in Medicine exemplars “what helped?”, what made it easier for them to move positively through their difficult experiences? Here’s a summary of what they told us. Having a community, someone they could talk to, to tell their story, was important. Cultivating gratitude and positive emotion, quiet reflection (whether meditation, mindfulness, prayer) was helpful. Doing something positive, which often involved doing things for others, was helpful. And having a moral or spiritual grounding helped to guide them through this process and helped them to “do the right thing” when it was hard.

There was something else surprising in the data. As researchers we experienced an ah ha moment as we painstakingly combed through the data. All of the exemplars had at one point made a choice, a conscious, deliberate choice to pursue something that was hard. It may not have been what they really wanted to do, and certainly not something they thought would necessarily end up well. But it was something they felt they had to do to set things straight. They chose, in many cases, the harder course of action. They chose to face their circumstances face on. We say, they “stepped in”. They may have decided to apologize to a patient or family, to go into a room full of intense judgment. It might have meant that they had to face their addiction, or take control of their health. At some point they made a courageous choice to make a difference in their own lives.

But how did these exemplars have the courage and the capacity to make these choices? I believe that the matrix in which we experience these difficult circumstances has a lot to do with how we move through them. Researcher John Meachum talks about a wisdom atmosphere as being one in which doubts, uncertainties and questions can be openly expressed, and ambiguities and contradictions can be tolerated, so that individuals are not forced to adopt the defensive position of what he calls “too confident knowing”.

Read more here.

Gender is not enough

Lesley Leyland Fields writes,

A man or woman, a boy or girl who tends toward the features considered “the other” may question his or her identity in a way that may not have happened a few decades ago.

It seems to me that men are hit particularly hard on this, from two directions. Women and girls enjoy a generous allowance that encourages the athlete, the supermodel, the CEO and the mother as equally valid expressions of femaleness. Many parents, like me, encourage our daughters to be pitchers and point guards (and fishermen) rather than princesses. But cultural expectations of masculinity are far more stingy. If a man is gentle, compassionate, artsy, empathetic, cultivates beauty in his life, talks with his hands, enjoys the friendship of women, his masculinity and sexuality is instantly questioned.

Nor are the stereotypes themselves gender equitable. After suffering generations of sexism, women fare much better than men under the current spotlight. Women are lauded for their neural plasticity; are seen as flexible, cooperative, compassionate, honest. Women outpace men in higher education, in employability, and in a score of other measures. And at the movies, they’re as glamorous and sexy as ever but they’re also Avengers, superheroes, as kick-ass as the men. Angelina Jolie, all 100 pounds of her, can flick a 300 pound villain over her gorgeous head. Women can do and be it all.

And men? Yes, athletes and superheroes, but not much else. They’ve been lame pathetic fathers in sitcoms for more than 20 years. The moral failures of male politicians has come to feel like the norm. Physiologically, men are critiqued for their single-lobed rigidity, for their lone-wolf leadership style, leading one social observer, Hanna Rosen, to her 2010 provocative cover story for The Atlantic, The End of Men. In my day, many girls wanted to be boys, myself included because the boys held all the power. No longer. Now it is men who want to be women: three times as many men as women are undergoing sex reassignment surgery.

I’m not explaining away Jenner’s transformation on the media-ized ascendency of women in our time, though it may be a contributing factor. That double image of Bruce and then Caitlyn is a fitting poster for the increasing gap between the genders. But even more than this, Jenner’s interview and his Vanity Fair coverage poignantly highlights that our sexualized obsession with gender is failing us.



This is my hope, that whoever we are, we will be known not for our gender category but for our mercy, our wisdom, our kindness, our humility, our grace, and our love. If we allow the Holy Spirit to do this in us, we will be exactly who we were created to be, inside and out.

Read more here.

What does not kill me makes me sadder

Did you know that

The swashbuckling George S. Patton, who braved death in his drive to Germany and was worried about his role in a peacetime world, was paralyzed in a minor traffic accident shortly after the Allied victory — and on the day before he was to go home and leave postwar Europe for good. He died not on the battlefield, but painfully in bed in a military hospital in Germany.

Victor Davis Hanson ponders today about sadness, irony, narcissism, and learning from pain:

At best, all we can do, I think in our ignorance of causation, is to cover our bets and tread lightly and remain observant — keeping humble and modest in occasional good fortune (given so often that our blessings turn out to be dependent on the work of other friends and benefactors), while staying resolute in more frequent times of chaos and disaster, to be able to help and offer sanctuary to others.

It is wise to remember the good dead and emulate their example rather than to be caught up with the mediocre of the present. I certainly spend more time recalling the voice of my mother than listening to the televised psychodramas of our elite. Faith and transcendence in the end matter most, whether for us who believe in God and an eternal soul, or for the more agnostic humanists who trust that one’s good works now can affect others following them, from raising good children to planting an olive tree.

...As parents age, they gain perspective and calm, but also at the cost of growing pessimism or even a dangerous sense of preordination. These can be deadly pathologies as they take away the necessary spirit and audacity, so important in getting up one more morning and heading on to the next mission. (My 86-year-old grandfather was putting in new end posts in the vineyard on the day before he had a heart attack and died; my 80-year-old Swedish grandfather was breaking a young horse in his last few months.)

All the clichés that you all have heard about losing a child, and which we all of the uninitiated may have found strange or foreign — “I wished it was me,” “How unfair that parents outlive children,” “How did I cause this,” “Why didn’t I do that or this,” “I should have been a better parent, listener, friend, helper, benefactor, etc.” — I assure you turn out hardly to be clichés, but simply reflect over the centuries what is innate in every parent’s brain in extremis.

As we age and try to make sense of nonsense, we have only the solace that what is inexplicable now will be most explicable soon, and that we are not natives, as we assume, here, but refugees from home somewhere else, and that what seems all too real and hopeless we hope is a just a dream of what will be soon very real and hopeful.

I would amend Nietzsche’s often quoted line, “from life’s school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger,” to something like “what does not kill me, makes me sadder,” and leave it to fate whether sadder in the end proves stronger or wiser.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I try to read and excerpt everything VDH writes. This is the first time, though, that I was reduced to tears, as he tells us about his grandaughter and the death of his wonderful daughter Savannah. Read it here.

Does technology make us happier, or distracted, busy, and unhappy?

Two Australian academics have written a new book in which they assert that technology should "support well-being, wisdom and human potential.”
Read more here.

Time for a correction

Wisdom from a kid

"There's plenty of reasons to dance. You've just gotta look for 'em.

Just treat everybody like it's their birthday.

The biggest mess up? Not forgiving each other's mess ups!

You were made from love, to be love, to spread love!

Remember to let everybody know you're glad their here.

You're awake. You're awesome. Live like it!

Give more people reason to dance!"



Thanks to Ann Voskamp for posting this video.

"If I have enough time, I'll change the world!"

"If I can't impact people, then this whole thing is a waste!" Sharing a secret, a wisdom, beyond us.





Thanks to Ann Voskamp

Any truth to this?

Found here.

Wisdom, knowledge, and understanding freely given to us

Thanks to Liz Curtis Higgs, who asks us,

What is God asking you to do with his free gift of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding?

It is wise to be grateful

A research team has found that

“Cultivating the experience and expression of gratitude may be conducive to dealing with the demands of life in a wise way, and in this sense, to living a good life.”

Thanks to Ann Voskamp for linking to this article.

Staying on course

Mushroom reminds us that

we cannot live contrary to spiritual truth any more than we can defy the laws of physics in the material world.