The Potential To Become Great - Part 7
The fourth Cardinal Virtue is wisdom. Wisdom describes matured insight, discernment, judgment, and decision-making. In some ways wisdom is the fruit of practicing the other three virtues – justice, courage, and self-control. Wisdom embodies the cumulative experience of someone who struggles to live a virtuous life. In circumstance after circumstance, in event upon event, in trial after trial, the individual seeks to do what is “good”, and exercises himself toward justice with courage and self-control. In this pathway, he apprehends what is good and true. He learns from success, but more frequently he discerns truth through failures, setbacks, and hardships. If he is determined to mature, he will learn from the lives of other virtuous people - sometimes through biography, other times through cultural history, and still more frequently, through family and friends. Through practicing virtue, wisdom is learned – step-by-step, day-by-day, year-by-year. Wisdom becomes a skill, honed through life-long efforts to know the good, love the good, and choose the good.
Unlike any other human endeavor in which we become better and better through practice, wisdom’s deepest and most enduring lessons come at the hands of failure. The person who strives to become virtuous discovers how often he is wrong; how recurrently he is weak; how repeatedly he must say, “I am sorry.” In the end, the pathway to wisdom is paved with humility. Humility is wisdom’s midwife and its signature characteristic.
How then do we teach children wisdom? Well, we don’t. Instead we encourage, remind, inspire, and provoke them to practice the other virtues consistently and habitually. Practice leads to habit; habit to lifestyle. John Bargh, professor of social psychology at Yale and pioneer in the studies of automaticity, writes, “Most mental processes that adults perform happen automatically based upon their particular history of habit formation.” Similarly, Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and author at Harvard, writes about brain functioning, “What we know, what we believe, what we think, is a product of pattern recognition. Our thinking and behavior is based upon a personal history of patterns.”
Parents can start by reading stories of virtuous people or pointing out examples of virtuous behavior wherever they can be found. Parents can also begin by supplying the language for virtuous living: “Did you do your best? Did you try hard? Were you nice to everyone at school? Did you make friends? Did you listen to your teacher?” As children grow, parents can remind them, “What are your goals this quarter? Have you treated your classmates and teacher well? Were you respectful? Did you finish your work before you began playing?” Language precedes good behavior and consistency of good behavior becomes habit. When children grow up with the mantra to know the good, love the good and do the good, the effort to do so becomes a part of their personality.
We hope and strive that our children will excel in life - some professionally, some in academics, some in finance, some in power and influence. Each achievement is valuable, yet the personal satisfaction therein fades. Wisdom endures. It is the crowning attribute on a life lived well, and the greatest commodity with which to bless others.
By Charles Debealk
