On choices made

Some years ago, my mother returned from a business trip bearing three small, polished grey stones. Each was carved with a single word in a rustic script, and they had the feeling of small talismans, touchstones for powerful ideas.

She invited me to choose one for myself, to keep near my desk. I remember looking at them and feeling as if the decision signified something more than a simple rock on my tabletop--feeling that it was one of those moments that would come to define something important about my life.

At the time, I was surprised by my decision to leave 'Knowledge' for someone else. In thinking about it, I realized that I had always been chasing and cultivating knowledge, and that I already possessed good skills for finding it. I know a lot, about a lot of things--and I'm always learning more. So knowledge comes fairly naturally for me.

I chose 'Wisdom'. For me, 'wisdom' is a concept that ties into whole areas of my heart, mind, and experience. It's about using knowledge, well, wisely... and acting in harmony with the world. I'm reminded of a line from First Knight: "May God grant us the wisdom to discover the right, the will to choose it, and the strength to make it endure." Wisdom carries a flavor of introspection and reflection, and we often describe it as hard-won. Wise old sages bear the wisdom of experience with shoulders hunched by strain.

I think I've always longed for wisdom, and I think it's started to come in the last few years. I remember, after getting very sick with mononucleosis, gallstones, and then acute pancreatitis, thinking that my sense of priorities had changed somewhat. I also remember thinking, to my surprise, that the suffering was worthwhile because it gave me more compassion, and also because it gave me access to a richer fund of experience for teaching my art. Have you ever wondered what it feels like to want, more than anything, to die, just so the pain will stop? Pancreatitis taught me that, and I remember lying in my bed thinking that if I survived the experience, it was going to be a hell of a story for teaching suicide intervention.

Actually I was thinking that it was a damn good thing that I was way too sick to move, since I wanted to live. But sometimes you have to go through the hard times to discover what you want. There's that process-of-discovery thing again.

So, wisdom. I would hesitate to call myself wise. There's too much I don't know, too much I misunderstand, and too much within my heart that chafes against itself. I'm not calm enough, inside, to really call myself wise. But it seems like I'm making progress. I've been surprised that, lately, people have been calling on me to help them figure out their lives--and seemingly not because they want my knowledge. I listen, and talk... and they feel it helps them. Is that what wisdom means? The ability to help people even when you can't understand how it happened?

Or maybe wisdom is about understanding the limits of your own knowledge. About recognizing the difference between what you know and what you merely respect. Or maybe wisdom is about finding the deep compassion within yourself to understand that all people, everywhere, are going through their own hard times, and that helping them through it is good for its own sake. Wisdom. I think about it a lot, and I wonder whether I'll ever think I've arrived.

There was a third stone. I didn't choose it, and my mother kept it for herself. She brought it to the office where we both work, and it normally resides above the kitchen sink where we all see it several times a day. I think she gave it to us all, in trust, to share.

Alone at the office on a warm Saturday during the heart of Potsdam's Summer Festival, I've been carrying the stone around and thinking about its meaning. It strikes me as ironic that I chose Wisdom over Knowledge all those years ago, leaving Joy as a distant third... because, while I've found a fair bit of knowledge and some wisdom, I often feel that joy is missing.

Maybe it's having a depressive personality, or the memory of years of exclusion and teasing in school. Perhaps it's the knowledge that, even among my peers, my interests tend toward the unusual and obscure. I don't know. But I do know that joy is something that comes uneasily at best for me, and that it's skittish as a wild hare, easily frightened off.

I find it hard to smile, sometimes. I remember the times in school when Picture Day rolled around. We'd all dress nicely for the photographers, and I would fix my hair so that it looked dignified and proper, just like my dad had shown me. Like the young gentleman I aspired to be. I'd get up to the photographer's bench and the first thing that always happened was that they took a comb to my hair, reshaping it in some different way. Sometimes they made clucking noises as if to reproach me for my failings as a hair stylist. Finally, we would be ready, and they'd ask me to smile. I did.

"No, smile for real."

My real smile was never good enough for them. I guess it didn't show off enough of my preternaturally-straight teeth (which are now stained by coffee, experience, and Wisdom). Sometimes they would grab my face and rearrange it into what they thought a good child's smile looked like.

And ever since then, I've always had what my family called a "Special for Pictures" smile, which was really no smile at all. I've been trying to invite my smile back from wherever it's been hiding, but it is shy and awkward, and the process has been somewhat frustrating.

Sometimes I wonder whether joy comes from the part of my brain that died when I was born months premature and then failed to breathe for a while. They told my parents that I would be severely retarded, and that they should expect to raise a child who might, someday, be able to hold a job doing menial labor. Theoretically, at least, I'm about as brain-damaged as you can be and still function.

Well, I still did pretty well on Knowledge, and maybe on Wisdom. But Joy? I wonder, sometimes, whether Joy lived in the part of my brain that wasn't fully built yet, and I just haven't ever built it for myself.

So I've been trying to work on joy. I drink a cup of coffee from this bright yellow mug most of the days I'm at the office. It was a gift from one of our best volunteers, and it never fails to make me smile. It's such a lovely color.

I've been trying to teach myself that it's okay for me to feel lonely, and that I don't "deserve it" in some way. That I can like people and want to be with them, not solely because they know things I want to learn, but because their presence brings me joy. That it's okay to cry about the fact that my knee injury is still keeping me out of the mountains, not because it means I won't finish my Winter 46 for a while, but because I know that the injury bars my access to one of the purest sources of Joy I ever found.

In my studies of tai chi chuan, I've been paying attention to the idea that all things change--that, as Heraclitus put it, change is the only universal constant. We try to flow through our movements, feeling the flow of weight and energy through our movements. It works--you become more sensitive to the movements of other people, and it's helpful for intuition as much as self-defense. But I've also begun to notice the changing flows within my own emotions, which is rarely comfortable these days. I guess knowing is half the battle. Except that knowledge is that first stone, and wisdom the second.

I am working to claim the third stone for myself. Which stones do you carry?