Wisdom

“When I think of all the crap I learnt at High School, it’s a wonder that I can think at all.” Paul Simon song.

I am an admirer of Paul Simon, his music, lyrics and style. The quote, to me, reverberates with interesting complexities, many of them contradictory.

It echoes feelings of adolescent intellectual rebelliousness. Of course, Paul Simon is very clever. There are elements of both wisdom and foolishness in the possible meanings and thoughts which can stem from the line. There are resonances of J.D. Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’; I am sure that Paul Simon is a J. D. Salinger fan.

I think I was born with very high levels of intellectual rebelliousness myself, it can lead you into trouble and out of trouble, it takes wisdom to control it but wisdom is in short supply and difficult to find. Or is it? In King John, one of Shakespeare’s characters says, “Wisdom cries out in the streets, but no one listens”. It is a very profound statement, wisdom is easy to find; all you have to do is close your eyes, relax, and ask yourself what a wise person would suggest you should do. Notice that I say ‘what a wise person would advise you to do’, not what the wise person would necessarily do, because wise people are much better at being wise for others than they are at being wise for themselves.

Wisdom requires quite a lot of knowledge as well as good systems of thought and, very sadly much of what people think they know, and firmly believe, really is total crap. Ignoring what you learn from High School will not help at all. Treating everything you think you know with healthy scepticism helps a lot but it cannot be the complete answer. We have to make decisions, sometimes we have to make them very quickly indeed, and sometimes the very worst decision is to make no decision at all but just keep threshing the possibilities over and over again in the mind. It may be here that what you learnt from High School can save your life, or even more importantly, somebody else’s life. (There is a song, which I like, and fits me; ‘Somebody saved my life today’, for me that person is Fay, my wife, now you see why I love, admire and care for her so much.)