A wiser world is depending on us coming together

​Pastor Ashley Wooldridge says, "wisdom is caught more than it is taught." His point is, it's hard to become wise if you're doing life alone.

I felt this truth yesterday.

I led a trauma informed leadership workshop for 50 leaders. I was there to teach people things about trauma and human emotions and the implications of those emotions on human relationships that maybe they didn't know.

I'm sure, indeed, that many left with knowledge they didn't already have, but I assure you that I, the teacher, left with wisdom that I didn't already have.

When you teach something new, people often share how that missing principle has impacted their lives. Or, positively at times, how practicing a piece of that knowledge has bolstered their lives.

Either way, you get to share in stories. You get to hear and see and feel how what people know is experienced in their world. It's the human emotions attached to knowledge that drives home its value. Drives it home to a space where wisdom takes root. Even in the teacher. Quite likely, MORE SO in the teacher.

I think our declining mental and physical health is the greatest consequence of our loneliness epidemic, because plenty of reliable research DOES suggest we are lonelier than ever.

But right behind those health implications might just be our collective decline in wisdom. If wisdom can only be gained in each other's company - in each other's shared stories - how wise is a world that spends increasing amounts of time alone?

There is so much information at our disposal today. Full confession, AI created several of my slides for the presentation I delivered yesterday. And so, more and more, we can be convinced that everything we need to know can be found in our phone or on our laptop and with nary another soul in sight.

But it begs the question, what is the value of being the smartest generation ever if we are the unhealthiest generation ever? What is the value of being the smartest generation ever when so much smart research suggests we might just be the unhappiest generation ever?

I think we are completely overwhelmed with information we have no idea what to do with. And we have no idea what to do with it because we aren't sitting in circles or at dinner tables or in classrooms with fellow humans talking about how to live life with all that we know.

We don't get to hear the stories that come from people living out lives according to what they know and don't know, and then together, gain the wisdom to make healthy adjustments to our lives one way or another in response to the stories.

It's very difficult to change the direction of our lives based on SOMETHING we know, at least in comparison to the possibilities for change that come from sitting with PEOPLE we know.

It's wisdom far more that intelligence that changes directions, and only one of them requires human connection.

We all DO need each other, a wiser and healthier world is depending on it.