I have come to the conclusion that humans are the incubators of wisdom and the distributors, however badly, of understanding.

When we’re young, we store data—the zeroes and ones of life that have superficial value in their raw form, like the transmitted bytes of a streaming video that make no sense until we interpret and display them on our tablets or TVs. In essence, we’re storage devices. But as we grow older, we add insight and logic and knowledge to our toolboxes of life, along with the ability to learn from the mistakes we make.

It occurs to me, though, that as we approach the later stages of life, the end of our careers, “the third trimester of life,” we realize that working deep within our bodies is a machine that up until then we didn’t know we had. It’s a digester and fermenter, similar to those used in wineries and paper plants and whiskey distilleries. But instead of making paper pulp or aging fine wine or barreling sour mash whiskey, our chemistry creates a different product.

This complex process, during which data becomes information, and information mixes with experience to become knowledge, and knowledge mixes with application to become insight, and finally, insight mixes with reflection to become wisdom, this process defines the chemical plant, the refinery of human progress, and its ultimate distillate, understanding.

Throughout the first phases of life—infancy, childhood, adulthood—we take in the experiences of life and store them for the future, for an incalculably valuable application that comes later. As we enter the phase known as elderhood, we realize that another substance has been made increasingly available to us, something fleeting and ephemeral: time. And time? Time’s a catalyst, an accelerant, the change agent that converts all that we know internally into something of immense value when it is shared externally. 

As we pass into elderhood, our wisdom becomes our currency, our mechanism for continuing to bring value to the society in which we play a part. But at this stage of our lives, for the most part, anyway, we no longer do; that’s not our job. However, we observe, we reflect, we advise. We become a feeder mechanism, a contributor to the process of perfection, offering small additions to the whole that bring bursts of efficiency and effectiveness to the efforts of those who are in the earlier stages, still collecting and processing and fighting to make sense of it all. We’ve already done that, and we know how it ends. Let us offer a suggestion, not because the way you’re doing it is wrong, but because we know where the pitfalls are, and we’d like to save you the trouble.

The other morning, I sat with a group of retired people who gather every day at the local coffee shop. I laughed quietly when I reflected on the fact that I was pretty much the same age as these…old people. 

The conversation swirled around grandchildren; whose kids had changed jobs or moved house; whose knees creaked the loudest; a smattering of quickly dismissed political disgust. And then, the conversation made its inevitable shift.

“Do you remember when…”

“I remember that time when…”

“When I was just starting out…”

When. The indicator of time spent.

There it was. “The good old days.” But as I sat and listened, a realization dawned. Is that really what the conversation was about? Were these just wistful reminiscences of a time and place and way of life long past? Some of them, perhaps; as humans, we do have a tendency to long for the illusion of better times. But as I listened, and as I later thought about the conversation during my long walk home, I realized that these discussions among people who have made 60 or 70 or more journeys around the sun aren’t just about the myth of better times past. They’re about process. They serve as validation, a form of error checking, of the machinery that got them this far, more or less intact, with a store of hard-fought wisdom that they’re willing to share with anyone willing to listen. It isn’t about ‘my way is better;’ it’s about the fact that there are different ways, all with merit, and the more of them you have in your toolbox, the better prepared you are to handle the challenges you’ll confront during your own exciting life. 

So, here’s what I know. 

I’ve come to understand that skill and knowledge are applied in life against a fabric of ‘what,’ while wisdom is applied against the weave and weft of ‘why.’ Let me explain that meaningless observation. ‘What’ is a tactical question that speaks to something executable: Here’s what we’re going to do. The objective of ‘what’ requires skill to do it right, and knowledge to do it efficiently.

‘Why,’ on the other hand, is a strategic question, one that asks for slowness and patience. Before we do anything, let’s first ask why we’re going to do it in the first place. The objective of ‘why’ requires insight and wisdom to ensure that there’s a good reason to do something in the first place. Why waste the time and energy and other resources on a task that has no merit?

Here’s what else I know. The way I did things won’t work for some, but will work for others. If it helps, it’s yours to take.

Finally, I know this. 

The challenges and trials that my children and their children will face during their lifetimes, at a human, societal level, are the same as those that I and my generational peers faced, and the same as those that Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians faced off against. They’re the same challenges faced by people who stared into the reality of the American Civil War and two world wars, and every other conflict fought in the name of some existential cause. They’re the same as those that confront Sana’a Bushmen and the Panará and the Sentinelese and the Toromona and the Awá, groups of people most of us have never heard of, and who like it that way, thank you very much.

Some will argue that today’s problems are different, that modern challenges are more serious, or impactful, or deadly, or extensive, or permanent than those faced by prior generations. With respect, I disagree. Homo sapiens has been around for 300,000 years, give or take, and the last ice age ended 25,000 years ago, which means that we shivered as we sorted it out for many years of uninterrupted winter. I’d call that serious. The Krakatoa eruption in Indonesia in 1883 killed 36,000 people instantly, and caused the planet to cool by almost a degree for an entire year.

Internecine warfare on every continent has existentially threatened entire populations and cultures over countless centuries, some of them recorded, some not. Some of those nations and cultures lost themselves and slipped beneath the waves of human memory. 

In the 1960s, the air in many cities was deadly. Rivers caught fire from industrial waste that was wantonly dumped into them. The careless use of pesticides almost made our national symbol and many of its cousins extinct. And school children—I was among them—had to respond to nuclear attack drills by traipsing into the hallway of the school, sitting down, facing the cinderblock wall, and covering our heads with our arms—as if that would protect against thermonuclear incineration.

As I close in on my 70th birthday, a little back-of-the-calculator astronomical math tells me that I have traveled forty billion, five-hundred-and-eighty-eight-million miles aboard spaceship Earth since my birth in Amarillo, Texas. That has to count for something. And here’s what I believe it counts for. Said a different way, here’s what my own hard-fought wisdom has taught me, or causes me to conclude.

The planet routinely tosses challenges our way because it’s a planet that has an atmosphere that supports life as we know it. It holds no special prejudice against humans; other species are affected by these challenges as much as we are. Is the planet currently in a warming state? Absolutely. Did we contribute to it? No question—the science is clear on that. Does the Earth care? Not even a little bit. If we survive, so be it. If not, well, nice experiment, curious creatures, but move along, please. Now serving species nine billion and one. The planet doesn’t care.

The concept of human supremacy is fatally flawed. We see ourselves as exceptional, not because we are, but because we choose to believe it. There is no evidence whatsoever that demonstrates human exceptionalism. Want proof? Okay. Watch Arctic terns migrate 19,000 miles every year, between the Arctic and Antarctic poles, following the planet’s magnetic lines of force to return, year after year, to precisely the same spot where they started, often to the very same nest site. Look at the intricate engineering of a weaver bird’s or oriole’s nest. While you’re at it, have a look at a hummingbird’s egg cup, at the underground architecture of an ant colony, at the lonely beauty of hidden messages in whale song. Marvel at the sub-sonic rumbles that elephants use to communicate with one another over miles of distance. Witness an orb weaver’s web, the monarch’s 3,000-mile annual journey, the intricate dance of courting birds of paradise. Dig into the rich culture of a wolf pack, or a lion pride, or a cheetah family, or a herd of elephants. Watch a murmuration of starlings, or a massive hover of sardines, as they move as one, creating fantastic shapes in the sky or water to do—what, exactly? We have no idea.

Travel to the Blue Ridge at one magical time of year, when tens of thousands of fireflies light the forest, flashing in synchrony. Look at the waters off the eastern end of Vieques Island in the eastern Caribbean, as bioluminescent plankton set the ocean afire with their glow.  Witness the many, many species that anticipate earthquakes and tsunamis without benefit of the U.S. Geological Survey and move to high ground before they strike. 

Then, there are our so-called inventions. That shimmery red paint on new cars? Nope. Copied from the prismatic structure of songbird feathers. Those innovative chimney designs for highly effective natural air conditioning in the houses of the Middle East? Copied from African termite mounds. Airplane wings? Bird wings. That Olympic swimmer who has a fraction of a second of advantage over her equally gifted peers? She’s wearing a swimsuit with fabric that mimics the drag-resisting denticles of sharkskin. Velcro? Burdock. I can continue, but I think you catch my drift. We’re not all that exceptional, unless you consider thievery and copycatting to be special traits. 

So, what’s my point with this wandering essay. Go back to the beginning. We have mastered the alchemy that converts data to information, information to knowledge, knowledge to insight, and insight to wisdom. We do those well. But here’s what we do poorly. First, we have largely lost the reverence we once had for wisdom. Here’s an example of just how damaging that can be.

In the late-1980s, a patient came into an emergency room complaining of chronic fatigue, belly pain, and weakness in his left knee. The ER staff went to work, but after hours of examination, they had no idea what the patient was suffering from. So, they admitted him and gave him medication for pain.

The next morning, the patient had a temperature of 106 degrees and was paralyzed from his hairline to the tips of his toes. He was breathing with such difficulty that they had to give him a tracheostomy and intubate him.

This was the medical equivalent of a four-alarm fire. Before long, the patient’s bed was surrounded by an army of specialists in Neurology. Cardiology. Endocrinology. Infectious disease. Psychiatry. Each of them performed an examination. Each of them came back with a diagnosis. Each of them was wrong.

One of the staff physicians was an elderly doctor who no longer actively practiced, but who still visited patients because he cared and wanted to stay active. He was looked on by the younger staff members as a doddering old guy who meant well, and as long as he stayed out of the way, they tolerated him. But none of them took him seriously.

One morning, two weeks into the patient’s mysterious illness with zero progress on diagnosis, this older doctor stuck his head in the door. “You know,’ he said, “these are the same symptoms I used to see in polio patients back in the 40s.” Well, you can imagine the reaction. The gathered experts rolled their eyes, patted him on the head, and sent him on his way. Polio indeed. Polio, they smirked, is extinct.

The patient had polio.

Interesting thing about polio: it’s a virus that attacks the intestines, and from there it spreads into the bloodstream. When polio vaccines first became available, the first one was an injection of Inactivated Polio Vaccine, which meant that even though the polio virus was dead, it still caused an immune response. Because this first vaccination was injected, it created antibodies in the bloodstream, not the intestines, and prevented the virus from traveling through the blood to the brain or spinal cord, preventing paralysis. It was considered a SECONDARY defense against the virus.

The Oral Polio Vaccines that came later consisted of a few drops of the vaccine, dripped onto a sugar cube—I remember them well. We all lined up at the school gymnasium to get our sugar cubes, which we ate. These oral vaccnes were created by WEAKENING the polio virus. The weakened virus created an immune response in the intestines, but wasn’t strong enough to cause the disease. And because polio is a gut virus which can spread to the bloodstream, the two oral vaccines were the FIRST line of defense against polio, because they kept the virus from doing that.

But there’s a caveat. The weakened virus particles do a good job of creating an immune response in the gut without giving the patient polio. But very rarely, they can evolve back to their infective state. One-in-700,000 people were victims of this—including our patient. But how did he get infected? Well, it turns out that his young son was given a second dose of the Oral Polio Vaccine, and it mutated. The baby was unaffected—but his father, who never got the third vaccine and wasn’t sufficiently immunized, caught polio while changing his son’s diaper. He never recovered.

It wasn’t skill and knowledge that identified the cause of the patient’s illness: it was wisdom. 

I said earlier that wisdom, a quality that we should revere, is one of the refined distillates of data and knowledge and insight. But there’s something even more valuable than wisdom that sugars off in this alchemical process, and that’s understanding. We don’t do that particularly well, either. And that, in my mind, is reckless, and even dangerous. Why? Because understanding, which comes from wisdom, especially when wisdom is applied to current data and knowledge, drives responsible action. Action drives change. But all too often, READY-AIM-FIRE become READY-FIRE-AIM. What’s the old expression? ‘Planning without action is futile. Action without planning is fatal.’ Or, as you’ve heard me say before, ‘Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.’ 

Just because we have a bigger brain than most creatures doesn’t mean that we use it effectively. We think of ourselves as logical creatures, but are we? I wonder. Those doctors who clung to their blind conclusions—I’m a cardiologist, therefore it has to be a cardiac problem—may very well have contributed to that patient’s paralysis and ultimate death. Never mind what the facts are telling us. Remember the story of the five blind men and the elephant? 

Wisdom ignored is opportunity lost.

Just something to think about.