Leisha I am 58 years old, coming up to fifteen years of living here in Ecuador, and lately I have been thinking a lot about learning. Not education exactly, and certainly not collecting more information just for the sake of knowing things. And I love learning and never want to give that up. But I mean the kind of learning that happens when something you were quite sure about suddenly opens another door, and behind that door are ten more questions you had never even thought to ask. It is exhilarating.
When I was little, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Other children had answers like veterinarian, teacher, nurse, astronaut. My answer was that I wanted to be wise. I don’t know where that came from, but I remember it very clearly. I didn’t want to be smart. I didn’t say I wanted to know everything. I wanted to be wise. I was considered the “one with brains” in my family, and I suppose that was my strong suit to prove my worth. And I gave up a lot for that strong suit.
At 58, I think I understand that little girl much better. She is still very much with me. Wisdom, at least as I understand it now, is knowing that you don’t know. It is being able to hold everything you have learned without becoming so attached to it that you can no longer see something new. It is being willing to say, “I might be wrong about this,” or, “There may be another piece here that I haven’t seen yet,” or, “What do I know?” That sounds simple, but I don’t think it is simple at all.
We humans love certainty. We like finding an explanation that makes sense and putting a box around it. Once we have named something, studied it, measured it or built a theory around it, there is a tendency to think we have understood it. But have we?
I don’t think we can ever completely conceptualize truth from the tiny little piece of space and time in which we are operating. We can observe, experiment, research, compare what we see with what other people have seen and develop theories that work extremely well, sometimes for hundreds of years, until somebody discovers another piece. Suddenly the picture gets larger. There is so much more.
And I also think there is always going to be deception. There is always going to be something that deceives us, whether it comes from outside of us or from something we have carried inside ourselves for a very long time. Maybe this is connected to a core belief I was raised with. I don’t know, but somewhere deep within me is the knowledge that deception is always at play. I don’t mean that personally, as though somebody is specifically trying to deceive me. I mean something much bigger than that. We have all been programmed in some way by our culture, our families, our education, our religion, our communities, the time in history we were born into, the information we were given and the information we were never given. If we cannot admit that our surroundings and our circumstances have influenced our thoughts, beliefs and choices, then we are kind of fucked. How can we possibly question what we believe if we cannot first admit that some of what we believe was put there before we were even old enough to question it?
That does not make the earlier learning useless. It simply means there was more to discover and find. I see this constantly in my own life and work. The past five or six years have been a deep transformation for me. It is the first time I am “alone,” in the sense that no child or partner is with me, and I have embraced the opportunity to be “me.”
The deeper I have gone into the soil, plants, microbes, the human body and the microbiome, the less interested I have become in simple answers. Every layer seems to lead into another layer. You learn about a plant and then discover its relationship with the soil it grew in. You study the soil and discover that its chemistry cannot really be separated from its biology. Then you start looking at the bacteria, fungi, protozoa and all the microscopic relationships happening around the roots, and suddenly the plant you thought you understood becomes part of an enormous living community. It is actually overwhelming. I don’t think we, me or science, actually have a good handle on what is real.
When you look at the human body, you find something remarkably similar happening there. We are communities too. We know nothing about this, really. It is such a young science and, to be honest, I don’t think that science can ever explain this. Sure, we can test, if the funding comes in, but the reality is that it is us, the people returning to an ancestral way, who will connect the dots.
Our digestion, immune response, nervous system, hormones, minerals, food, microbes, environment, emotions, sleep, movement and relationships are not separate subjects living in neat little compartments. They are constantly interacting. Pull one thread and another thread moves somewhere else. Where you are, where you live…that determines YOU. That has probably been one of the biggest lessons of my life. I am much less interested in asking, “What is the answer?” than I am in asking, “What is happening here?” It feels good to be here.
That little change in language opens an enormous space. It allows curiosity and humility. I asked for humility once…and got humbled. A life path I still experience. I am humbled constantly by what I don’t know. I can spend weeks researching something or trying to understand it with my brain. I think I finally understand it, and then I come across one piece of information that makes me go back and look at the whole thing again. We humans create stories. That is beautiful and confining. Sometimes I discover that something I believed twenty years ago needs changing. Sometimes something I dismissed years ago suddenly makes sense because I now have another piece of the picture.
I don’t find that threatening. I find it exciting and I am embracing it. If I knew everything already, what on earth would I do tomorrow? Learning has probably been the most consistent thread running through my life. I am always studying something, experimenting with something, growing something, watching something under a microscope, wondering why something happened, trying something another way or asking another question.
And the question underneath so much of it is very simple: What am I not seeing? I think that is an incredibly important question because we usually don’t know what we don’t know…the tricky part. You can only ask questions from within the boundaries of what you can currently imagine. Then somebody shows you something outside those boundaries and suddenly you realize there was an entire landscape sitting there that you didn’t even know existed. But, we need to be careful.
Technology has made that landscape almost unimaginably large. We now have access to information that I could never have imagined having when I was young. I can follow a question through scientific papers, old books, different cultures, historical records and conversations taking place on the other side of the world without leaving my home. I can use technology to compare ideas, organize information and find connections much faster than I ever could before.
It is beautiful and dangerous. I think we need to be careful about confusing access to information with wisdom. Technology can collect information at a speed the human brain never could. It can identify patterns, organize enormous amounts of material and help us investigate questions that might once have taken months or years. What it cannot do for us is live our lives.
It cannot replace the strange collection of things we call common sense, intuition, experience, emotion, observation and that feeling somewhere inside us that says, “Hang on. Something doesn’t quite fit here.” These human attributes are important too. Sometimes something looks perfect on paper and makes absolutely no sense, complete nonsense, when you put your hands in the soil. The numbers say one thing, as with soil tests, and the plant tells you another. A person sitting in front of you does not fit neatly into what a textbook says should be happening. A situation causes you discomfort, but it is a life lesson unfolding.
I think questioning has become confused in our culture with disbelief or opposition. I don’t see it that way Questioning is how we learn. If we are not allowed to question an idea, how can we test it? If we cannot ask whether something could be improved, how does anything improve? If we are afraid to look at evidence that contradicts what we already believe, are we actually searching for truth, or are we just defending a position?
I have changed my mind about many things in my life, and I hope I continue changing my mind until I die or because I want to drift around without any convictions, but because I want my convictions to remain alive enough to grow when new information appears.
There are things I believe very strongly today. I believe life organizes itself through relationships. I believe shitty situations are teachers. I believe microbes are foundational to life on this planet and to us human beings. I believe we have an intelligence that deserves far more respect than we often give it, especially today.
But even within those beliefs, I will keep asking questions because I am not finished and not even close. There are seeds I haven’t grown yet, microbes I haven’t met, plants I don’t understand, ideas I haven’t considered, mistakes I haven’t made and questions I don’t even know exist. I am human.
And somehow, as I approach sixty, that feels much more exciting than having all the answers. Maybe that little girl who wanted to grow up to be wise understood something before I did. Wisdom wasn’t going to be reaching a place where I finally knew everything. It was going to be reaching a place where I was comfortable knowing that I never would. An uncomfortable place that I accept.
So whenever I become absolutely certain that I have finally figured something out, I hope I remember to turn it over one more time, look underneath it and ask another question. Just in case.
