Wisdom Come from Experience

To have wisdom and the ability to learn about new subjects and have critical thinking skills is a prime importance for our future. Wisdom is the quality of having experience and good judgment, it’s the ability to gain knowledge and last longer than any material possessions can hold. This might be why we look up to our parents and grandparents as wise because they’ve been around longer. In the passage “The Owl Has Flown”, Birkerts explains our lack of interest in learning and reading.

He explains how we skim over most things we read because with the technology we have today we are learning how to adjust to all the quick information and short references to words. Our brains are becoming like computers compacting things down to smaller sizes. He explains how information is shifting from paper to computer, everything that was once on a page is now on the screen.

Birkerts states “When everything is permitted, Nietzsche said, we have nihilism; likewise, when everything is happening everywhere, it gets harder to care about anything.

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How do we assign value”(73)?When everything is handed to us it gets harder to really care about anything and to have the motive to learn new things. Value is something that has holds worth and importance, desirable to an individual. We create value by going in depth and creating a deep connection with the things around us gaining back our vertical consciousness. Scott Russell Sanders, a novelist, and essayist, author of “The Inheritance of Tools”, explains how his personality came into being by the experiences he had with his father and grandfather.

As his wife tells him of his father's passing he hit his thumb with a hammer bringing the first flashback of the pain he had when hitting his thumb as a child. Sander states “I was thinking of my father, as I always did whenever I built anything, thinking how he would have gone about the work, hearing in memory what he would have said about the wisdom of hitting the nail instead of my thumb” (147).

The memories he had about how his father would have approached how to fix something gave him wisdom because his father taught him how to build things. The Experiences we have allow us to think logically and reasonable about events in our lives just as Sanders remembered his father mocking him about hitting the nail the right way and how his words have taught him how to respect and use his tools. Experience combined with connection allows us to relate to events, by doing this it produces a value from experience. His memories mean a lot to him because they help him in his daily life. The value he holds with his memories is the value that can be synthesized into knowledge/wisdom. Birkerts points out how we depend far less on our memories because, why try to remember when everything can be stored until we're ready to refer back to it. Sanders and Birkerts both believe by the brain assigning value to something like our memories or reading, it can help our decision making and comprehensible skills leading to wisdom. By stimulating and stretching our brain to think and refer back to things for wisdom this could be a way to gain our vertical awareness.