Golden Moment Article 1
Most of us don’t spend much of our lives trying to become wise.
When we’re young, life is usually about much more immediate concerns. We’re trying to finish school or university, establish a career, find someone to love, perhaps raise a family, pay the mortgage or simply work out what on earth we’re doing with our lives. If we’re honest, many of us have spent considerably more time thinking about adventure, romance and sex than we ever have about wisdom. Yet the relationship between wisdom and mindfulness has fascinated me for much of my professional life.
The word itself can sound rather intimidating. It conjures up images of philosophers, spiritual teachers and elderly relatives dispensing advice that nobody asked for. It’s not usually the sort of thing we aspire to while filling out university applications.
And yet, whether we realise it or not, most of us eventually find ourselves searching for something that looks a lot like wisdom.
Life has a way of presenting us with problems that knowledge alone can’t solve. We discover that understanding the biochemistry of depression is one thing; helping a grieving friend is another. We learn that intelligence doesn’t necessarily lead to good judgement, that success doesn’t guarantee happiness, and that experience, although a wonderful teacher, doesn’t always teach the same lesson to everyone.
As the years pass, many of us begin to notice people who seem to navigate these complexities particularly well. They aren’t necessarily the cleverest people we know, nor the most successful. They often hold quite different views about politics, religion and almost everything else. Yet when life becomes confusing, they’re the people we find ourselves wanting to talk to.
I’ve often wondered what it is about them.
As a psychiatrist, I’ve spent much of my working life asking myself that question. However, I never set out to become “wise”. To be honest, I still find the word slightly uncomfortable. It can sound pretentious, as though wisdom belongs to philosophers or spiritual teachers rather than ordinary people trying to navigate ordinary lives. But I couldn’t think of another word that captured what I kept noticing in certain people. Even now, I sometimes wince slightly when I use it.
One person, in particular, left a lasting impression on me. She was a senior Māori psychiatric nurse with whom I worked many years ago. Patients trusted her almost instinctively, junior staff sought her advice and even the most experienced doctors listened carefully when she spoke. Yet there was nothing remotely self-important about her. She never seemed to be trying to influence people. She simply had a quiet way of bringing out the best in the people around her.
What I remember most vividly wasn’t anything she did during ward rounds or clinical meetings. It was morning tea.
Every morning at tea break she would bring out the newspaper cryptic crossword. Usually, it wasn’t a group activity at all. More often she would sit beside one doctor, nurse or allied health worker and gently teach them how to unravel cryptic clues. She invited us into the quiet pleasure of wondering, making connections, following blind alleys and occasionally sharing a smile when an answer finally revealed itself. Sometimes others would drift over for a few minutes before returning to work. At the time it all seemed perfectly ordinary. In fact, I doubt any of us gave it much thought.
It was only years later that I realised the crossword had never really been about the crossword.
Without ever announcing her intentions, she’d created a small daily ritual that gently dissolved the usual professional boundaries of a busy psychiatric unit. Doctors, nurses and allied health staff weren’t relating primarily through their roles or their disagreements. For a few quiet minutes they were simply two people sharing the pleasure of thinking something through together.
It wasn’t dramatic. Yet over time those countless small conversations seemed to change something about the atmosphere of the unit. People knew one another a little better. Professional differences still existed, but they unfolded within relationships that had become just a little more human.
Looking back, I suspect she understood something that many of us overlook. Wisdom isn’t always expressed through brilliant insights or important decisions. Sometimes it reveals itself through the creation of the conditions in which other people naturally become more open, thoughtful and connected.
The more I reflected on people like her, the more intrigued I became. They clearly possessed something that couldn’t be explained simply by intelligence, experience or professional training. Yet for many years I had no better way of understanding it myself.
Then something else began happening.
Through my own mindfulness practice—and occasionally in the midst of everyday life—I began experiencing brief moments that felt quite unlike my usual way of seeing the world. Sometimes a difficult situation would suddenly become unexpectedly clear. Sometimes I experienced an unexpected sense of connection with another person. At other times there was no particular insight at all, only a profound sense of openness, as though the usual chatter of the mind had briefly stepped aside and allowed reality to reveal itself more directly.
Those experiences were often fleeting. Like dreams, they could be surprisingly difficult to describe afterwards. Yet they stayed with me. They seemed to point towards a different way of meeting life, yet I couldn’t see how they related to the quiet wisdom I had admired in people like my Māori colleague.
For many years I regarded these as two quite separate mysteries. One concerned the people who seemed to move through life with unusual steadiness, compassion and discernment. The other concerned those rare moments when our ordinary way of experiencing the world briefly gives way to something clearer, more open and somehow more connected.
It would take many more years before I began to realise that those two lines of enquiry were gradually converging.
The more I reflected on them, the more I found myself returning to the same questions. What made those moments possible? Why did they seem to arise so naturally in some people and so rarely in others? And if they were more than random flashes of good fortune, could we learn to create the conditions in which they became more likely?
Those questions stayed with me for many years. They gradually shaped the way I practised psychiatry, the way I taught mindfulness and, eventually, the development of Mindful Representations and The Golden Moment trilogy. Looking back, I can now see that everything grew from a single, deceptively simple question that I couldn’t quite let go of:
If experience alone doesn’t make us wiser, what does?