"No one can give away wisdom. A teacher can only lead you to it via words, hoping you will have the courage to look within yourself and find it inside your own consciousness…The wisdom humanity seeks lies within the consciousness of all." - Sydney Banks

“Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.” - Poet Hermann Hesse

We’ve all heard the quote, “There’s a reason your windshield is bigger than your rearview mirror; where you’re headed is more important than what you’ve left behind.

During some difficult periods recently, I found powerful inspiration in two Presidential speeches, one very recent and one from long ago.

I had never pondered the difference between these two words until my friend Joaquin Dulitzky told me the following:

In the next decade, we’re going to see a significant surge in the value placed on wisdom. Unlike knowledge, wisdom is one of the key differentiators for humans versus artificial intelligence. With this in mind, I wanted to start capturing my wisdom principles and practices. Of course, this is a work-in-progress so it will evolve with time.

Okay, I’m not going to be a rumor-monger and suggest that these two icons had a thing going on (Chip, did you really write that?!), but they both captured my heart and, yet, I wish I’d gotten to know them a little more deeply.

You know that feeling when someone offers you a sentence that takes your breath away? I vividly recall the moment when my friend Ben called me a “social alchemist,” an expert mixologist of people. It stopped me cold in my tracks, offering me a whole new perspective on one of my unique gifts.

MIT’s AgeLab’s Joe Coughlin wrote this interesting Forbes article about the idea that men tend to see retirement as the final chapter while women see it as a fresh start (this post will focus exclusively on heterosexual relationships since that was the focus of MIT’s study).

Wondering while wandering can be a beautiful and profound form of presence. But then my mind starts whirling and worrying about things as if some destination needs to be quickly established or I have lost my direction; my purpose, indeed my very meaning.