Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman

Author:Andrew Zuckerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-11-12T18:30:00+00:00

The heart is what matters most of all. The act of compassion, of being able to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and to avoid any kind of harm to any other human being would be the best thing that could happen in the world. That’s what is hopeful about Obama. I have a feeling that the United States could be a leader in improving things in the world, rather than what we are right now, the biggest problem in the world.

Jimmy Little

Wisdom came naturally to me. I didn’t question it as a boy, being the eldest with all my siblings and growing up, with mum and dad as two bookends, figures, role models. We all had this wonderful oral history—passing on of our history, our culture and of our beliefs. Mum and dad didn’t strictly sit us down to a schooling of, “This is right, that’s wrong, this is okay.” It was kind of bred naturally. You’d go to camps, like the other neighbors who were all camping in one big area, and everybody acted the same and did the same; so there was a similarity right across the board of respect, grace, faith. All of this amounted to wisdom to us. The children were taken by the mothers and by the fathers in different paths of learning: this is what you eat, this is the bush medicine, this is the bush tucker, and this is a no-no—all those things were so natural that we just didn’t question it, we just went along with it. But at the same time, by the same token, in my case mum and dad and their parents gave us signs that we wouldn’t need all the indigenous Aboriginal teaching, because we were moving into another era, another lifestyle, another dimension. So we have to have room to do a translation, to transfer the skills into modern living, because they knew from their wisdom that we were going to grow up in a multicultural environment and not just an Aboriginal environment. In the colonization of the nation there was this awareness, “Oh, yeah, there’s new people around.” This is what my mum and dad were saying, and my grandparents: “You’ve got to be wise. You’ve got to be honest. You’ve got to be sincere. You’ve got to be true to yourself.” Imagine a big quilt—a pattern of life that we would have to live under. We were taught that the horizon, the ceiling and the floor of our region, of our territory, was our supermarket; it was our place of worship, our church; it was our recreational center; it was our craft room for making artifacts, painting, and boomerangs.

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