Wisdom, For the Ages
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
(T.S. Eliot)
These words, the quote for the day on the Insight Timer app earlier in the week, really struck me. They seem to fit so well this time we currently live in.
Yet, T.S. Eliot, poet and playwright, died six months before I was born. That was 1965, and decades before the internet, email, cell phones, smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence. Radio, airplanes, television, and nuclear power were significant advances during T.S. Eliot’s own lifetime, but the pace picked up after 1965.
His words are even more prophetic today. Strikingly so. Concerningly so. We are buried in far more information today than sixty years ago. We are caught in a cycle of constant information at our fingertips, and playing in our ears. Much of it is rather pointless, but entertaining. A growing amount of it is misinformation or completely untrue, and we still let it keep streaming in, literally.
I am about to veer off into an editorial, but you get the point. “The Age of Information” or “The Digital Age” is where we are and where we will remain. The tricky place we find ourselves in now is a sort of tipping point. Wisdom and knowledge remain abundant. Our caution, and our responsibility, is to make sure they don’t get completely lost and buried by the information.
No wonder T.S. Eliot looks pensive below.
He had some more fitting words for these cultural and societal circumstances:
“Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”
He had no idea how his words would resonate and sound a warning bell for us in 2025.
Believe me, I like the internet and my smartphone. I like easy access to word definitions or a check on historical timelines. I listen to meditation tracks streaming in my ears and I capture impressive photos as I walk in Nature.
I also strive for some sense of balance and to connect. To connect with my feet on the ground, my eyes to the sky. To connect with fellow humans through a smile and a greeting. To connect with myself by tuning in, not tuning out. It is in these connections that the information falls to the side, the knowledge knows to step out of the way, and the wisdom emerges, as significant and solid as ever.
Information is going to continue to grow exponentially. Our job is to keep connecting to our world, each other, and ourselves, so the knowledge and wisdom get some breathing space and can also continue to expand.
The concern seems large, but there is hope in the simple gestures we can each take today. For me, it can be putting my phone down and listening to the birds in morning song. Offering a greeting to a fellow human on the trail as we pass one another, remembering that we are far more alike than we are different. Reminding myself that some of Nature’s scenes only wish to be experienced, not captured through a camera.
Seek wisdom today. Share it. Write it down. Seek some more. Apply it to daily life. That’s the kind of app we need to all download in our heads and hearts and souls. Onward!
