photo credit: Zeus Meilichios Relief
The term “Wisdom” is best illustrated through the teachings of the Sumerians of Shuruppak city (2350 – 2600 B.C) declaring that:
- “You should not boast; then your words will be trusted.”
- “Tell a lie and then tell the truth; it will be considered a lie.”
- “A loving heart maintains a family; a hateful heart destroys a family.”
From these lines, we can see how the foreseeing concept formed them under the umbrella of society’s values, virtues, cultural impact, personal traits, and other environmental factors.
Nevertheless, Greeks pointed out ‘Wisdom’ as the main characteristic of the goddess ‘Metis’, who transferred it to ‘Zeus’ after marrying him, where this transfer led later to address him as ‘The Wise Consular’. Thereafter, the goddess ‘Athena’ inherited this wisdom as she sprung off his head.
From another angle of history, we can understand how ‘Wisdom’ is considered through Socrates’s proverb, ‘True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
We can find ‘Wisdom’ partially portrayed when we read the famous old English epic poem “Beowulf,” which depicts the heroic battle scenes of Beowulf towards ‘Grendel’ in Geatland and the dragon in Danes. Therefore, ‘Wisdom’ is considered a combined term that needs time to mature and be efficient, especially if the person has guiding benchmarks and an illuminated way that determines his brain’s aspects’ concerns and considerations to see the futuristic results of an action or a decision from a distance that is considered hard for others to do.
Virtue, honor, goodness, ethical calibration, and other elements are considered strong bases for ‘Wisdom,’ as they have to melt together under specific circumstances in a suitable and required timeline that allows the person to understand the effect of being wise, especially in a decision-making approach. Understanding and realizing are key points of offering good speculated protection to people in the surrounding environment or at any others, as it is very important to be a main reference on a case-by-case basis to provide wise consultancy guidelines to those who ask for it or ought to make a personal decision.
I believe if we review our decision-making case history, especially those that negatively influenced our lives’ directions, we will mostly like to change those decisions and make better ones alternatively. However, we might have the chance to rectify those by decreasing their negative impact using the best available approach, although we might have different environmental conditions that allow some of us to do so and others not.
If I may tell you my conceptual view on ‘Wisdom’ and how to initiate it, carefully grow it and let it flourish, then I can say it is similar to a good chef who uses light fire to ripe the meal in hand and you realize its tasty flavor from the essence of the place. Thereafter, decision-making was considered a crucial process that determines a person, committee, company, or nation’s future state depending on the circumstances of each case, which are mostly affected by the decision-maker’s characteristics.
However, the term ‘Wisdom’ can be used in different life aspects, though we can find it in business, politics, social matters, economy, science, and spiritual incentives. Therefore, the decision-maker(s) must be in the same field, as the knowledge base has an essential role in such a process. Wisdom is a management-affiliated term that should always be present in management matters to decrease proposed risks and increase fruitful implementation steps to reach the assigned objectives.
Chinese people have a long, well-known, rich history with ‘Wisdom’. We can find many proverbs and sayings related to famous names, like “Confucius, Law Tzu/Laozi, Mozi,” and others whose philosophies still have an impact on Chinese people inside and outside China, and on foreigners as well. Their philosophies rely on different bases, but all of them are considered rich in the ‘Wisdom’ gist, as we can find in this quote from Confucius: ‘When anger rises, think of the consequences’, as this is highly recommended in the decision-making process. While we find Laozi’s quote depicts, ‘The wise man knows what he does not know. Therefore, we can find out how rich and deep those meanings are.’
We also find Wisdom’s related quotes describing the multi-angle vision to achieve wise decisions or conclusions, e.g., what Ellen Glasgow said about patience and reaction: ‘What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens’. On the other hand, we can find what the novelist William Saroyan stated about wisdom, saying, ‘Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure’. Literature has kept a lot of stories, tales, and narratives about ‘Wisdom’ that illustrate how responsible persons in terms of leadership, management, or a personal aspect have studied their surrounding circumstances to conclude and make a requested decision at that time.
I will try to present some of those stories where the reader can realize the different types of measures and dimensions related to the term ‘Wisdom’ depending on each person’s position and the surrounding factors, in addition to what has been aforementioned. In the tale of the Samurai and the Zen Master, we can find how the request for wisdom presented was and how the answer has been illustrated to achieve the knowledge objective through a behavioral formula when the Samurai asked the master to teach him the ways to heaven and hell. This tale is famous in Japanese traditions for depicting the “live change” style through the mind’s conceptual aspects that lead to gratitude instead of anger, which may lead to a problem. Another tale that portrays how our attitude is an important illustration of ourselves is a factual example that we can see in what Mr. Winston Churchill says: “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” Considering it as a reflection of a famous tale of an Indian Chief with his grandsons about good and evil, two wolves have depicted their characters, and those wolves conclude that they are inside each one of us and how we control who will win the battle at the end.
“In the end, there are three things that matter in life: How well did you love? How fully did you live? And how deeply did you learn to let go?” If we look at Buddha’s saying that depicts ‘Wisdom’ in life, then we can understand how someone can align his life’s guidelines with such a concept.
In another important field of life that many people have not experienced, however, many others have gone through and experienced wise decision-making in terms of staying alive and avoiding harmful results. War is one of those fields, and as Dr. Neil Shortland and Prof. L.J. Alison (2015) indicated in their research, “War Stories: A Narrative Approach to Understanding Military Decisions,” that it shows how to consider and study the potential and risk levels in a decision-making approach.