It was two scout leaders — not the scoutmaster, who was intimidating and a little untouchable, but two of the assistant leaders, the ones whose sons were my friends, who I’d actually go to when something was wrong. My own father never came to scouting. These two men, who owed me nothing, were just there — patient, thoughtful, the kind of attention that doesn’t perform itself.

None of these people was teaching me wisdom. They were just being it in my direction, and something in me knew to take notes.

I’m starting to think this might be the actual mechanism — not that wisdom is taught, but that it’s recognized, the way you recognize a face before you can describe it. You collect impressions of it in other people, years before you can say what the impressions have in common. And only decades later, usually after you’ve made every mistake the wise person was trying to spare you, do you look back and go: oh. That’s what that was.

There’s a version of this in the Bible that I read for the first time around that same age, in an “open Bible” my step-grandmother gave me — translations printed right in the text, so a confused kid could actually follow it. Solomon becomes king after his father David dies, and he panics. He goes into the temple and basically tells God: I am completely unequipped for this. And God’s response isn’t here’s the answer to every problem you’ll face. It’s: you asked for wisdom instead of wealth or power, so that’s what you’ll get.

What stuck with me wasn’t the wisdom itself — Solomon’s actual track record is, generously, mixed. It was that he knew enough to ask for the right thing. He could see, before he had it, what he was missing.

Which might be the test. Not whether you have wisdom. Whether you can recognize its absence in yourself, and want it anyway, more than you want to look competent, more than you want to win the fight.

I still remember every dumb, impulsive thing I’ve ever done far more vividly than any wise thing I’ve ever managed. That seems to be universal. Foolishness leaves a scar; wisdom mostly just leaves a feeling, faint and retrospective, that someone older saw something you couldn’t yet see. Maybe that’s where it starts — not in having it, but in being close enough to it, in someone else, to feel its outline.

So here’s where I’ll leave it, because I don’t have the answer yet — that’s rather the point of the next twelve months:

Where were your first impressions of wisdom? Who gave you one, before you had the language to know that’s what it was?

Shine,