This book was full of wisdom, or at least a vision of it. I wish I could just read this book and become wise, but unfortunately it just paints a picture of what obtaining wisdom should look like. I am not saying the content is not good, because it is fantastic, but don't expect to be wise after reading it.
I took my time with this book and the book itself sort of asks that of the reader. It is not something you just slog through, but is a distillation of what Krista Tippett has found to be most crucial in the "art of living." Don't expect roadmaps, but expect questions and soft direction. Tippett is a seeker. You can tell she loves and lives with question. I find myself of a similar persuasion, so I deeply enjoyed this book.
I look forward to revisiting this book and seeking more wisdom in the future.
So many excellent and eloquent quotes. This may be my most highlighted Kindle book so far. Some of the following is not from Tippett, but from those she has interviewed over the years. Here is a just a snapshot of the content.
On tolerance:
"We chose too small a word in the decade of my birth—tolerance—to make the world we want to live in now. We opened to the racial difference that had been there all along, separate but equal, and to a new infusion of religions, ethnicities, and values. But tolerance doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment. Tolerance was a baby step to make pluralism possible, and pluralism, like every ism, holds an illusion of control. It doesn’t ask us to care for the stranger. It doesn’t even invite us to know each other, to be curious, to be open to be moved or surprised by each other."
On American Public Life:
"In America, many features of national public life are also better suited to adolescence than to adulthood. We don’t do things adults learn to do, like calm ourselves, and become less narcissistic. Much of politics and media sends us in the opposite, infantilizing direction. We reduce great questions of meaning and morality to “issues” and simplify them to two sides, allowing pundits and partisans to frame them in irreconcilable extremes. But most of us don’t see the world this way, and it’s not the way the world actually works."
On civil debate:
"the hallmark of a civil debate is when you can acknowledge that which is good in the position of the person you disagree with."
On admiration and love:
"When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together."
On the Miraculous and Love:
"What do you do about evil that swoops down completely at random? I suppose that’s where the issue of miracles comes in, that so many things had to happen in the right way, or the wrong way, depending on how you put it, for this particular young woman to meet this particular guy in the parking lot at 7:00 in the morning. That is as improbable as any miracle. And because of that, a miracle to me can’t just be something that was providential, that everything had to line up just right in order for it to happen. Bad things happen that way too. Really bad things happen that way too. If I look at it from another perspective, and this is really the perspective I maintain, I don’t look for God or God’s work in magic or in tricks or in, you know, “this is what I want” and then I get it. I look for God’s work always in how people love each other, in just the acts of love that I see around me."
God is bigger than Religion:
"The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.” Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion."
On Resilience:
"I’m glad for the language of resilience that has entered the twenty- first-century lexicon, from urban planning to mental health. Resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability. It acknowledges from the outset that things will go wrong. All of our solutions will eventually outlive their usefulness. We will make messes, and disruption we do not cause or predict will land on us. This is the drama of being alive. To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It’s a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness—not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn’t overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves."
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Top reviews from other countries
Luke Leighfield
Ambitious, magical, wise
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 2016
Luke Leighfield
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 2016
Thankfully, Tippett's chosen to present a gift to the world in the form of 'Becoming Wise'. It's a distillation of some of her most memorable conversations, and acts as a kind of guide to living – how to be. The richness of the book is almost overwhelming – it's sumptuously written, full of wisdom from some of the greatest thinkers of our time, ambitious in its scope – and I wanted to underline almost every word. It's one of the best books I've read all year.
"And so in choosing how we are in the world, we shape our experience of that world, our contribution to it. We shape our world, our inner world, our outer world, which is really the only one we'll ever know. And to me, that's the substance of the spiritual journey. It's not an exasperating idea but an infinitely emboldening one, and it's taken me many years to come to that without resistance."
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