PROLOGUE

THIS BOOK is about working for a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world while cultivating the wisdom that supports and deepens this work. Over the course of my career as a social entrepreneur and activist, I have launched public interest law firms, designed and led a new public interest law school, and served as founding president of a major foundation. I had a growing intuition that something was missing, and I sought ways of developing inner resources that complemented my cognitive and adversarial skills. These explorations led me to the conviction that the practice of wisdom is essential both to my own effectiveness and well-being and to our collective capacity to address the challenges of the twenty-first century successfully.

A critical juncture in my inner explorations occurred in 1990. On a beautiful autumn day, I began a pilgrimage to Dharamsala for a meeting with the Dalai Lama. I spent an afternoon in the crowded streets of New Delhi, gasping for breath in the fetid air and bargaining for gifts in the teeming bazaars. I took a night train to Patankot, wedged into a bunk bed between gun-toting guards and maroonclad 2monks. The taxi to Dharamsala detoured around religious demonstrations, where the smoke of burning tires hung in the air. Then I found myself in the foothills of the Himalayas, sitting in the tranquility of the Dalai Lama’s parlor with a group of monks and rabbis, listening to wide-ranging exchanges between the Dalai Lama and some of the great living masters of Kabala and Jewish mysticism. As president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, I had helped to convene this unlikely meeting, a dialogue unprecedented in the long history of the two religions.

While the substance of the discussions was interesting, from comparative mysticism to the challenge of retaining traditions in diaspora, I was transfixed by the qualities of the Dalai Lama himself: his presence, clarity, and kindness. He had an enormous and inclusive curiosity, an incisive and penetrating intelligence, and a resounding laugh. I was as impressed by the way he listened—with complete presence and unwavering attention—as by the words he spoke.

His compassion for the suffering of the Tibetan people was profound. Although he was a vigorous, courageous champion of the Tibetan cause and a staunch opponent of Chinese domination of Tibet, he spoke of the Chinese with equanimity and without hatred. His daily, intimate exposure to the suffering of his people had not undermined his inclusive humanity or his joy in living.

I felt I could learn something here that might help me pull together the sporadic efforts to cultivate wisdom that I had pursued in parallel with my work as an activist and social entrepreneur. As I listened to the Dalai Lama speak, I thought, “So this is what it looks like when inner work and committed work in the world come together.”

I realized that my inner work had prepared me to engage with the Dalai Lama fully and receptively, to set aside my lawyerly skepticism and ingrained irony, and to open to the Dalai Lama in his total 3being—to the fullness of who he was, to his humility and compassion. My perception of the Dalai Lama’s wisdom led me to reflect that wisdom is not just an abstract possibility, and that anyone can commit to developing wisdom.

The word wisdom rarely appears in legal, political, and scholarly discourse.¹ Different from being smart, well-educated, and discriminating, wisdom entails a way of being—grounded, reflective, insightful, and compassionate. Each of us can do that, I thought— we can work toward wisdom, cultivating these qualities, living our lives in a way that makes us wiser, not with the expectation of attaining the Dalai Lama’s level of wisdom, but with the belief that cultivating wisdom can move us toward greater balance and clarity, broader compassion, and improved effectiveness in our work in the world.

This book is for anyone who wants to explore that possibility. Each person who wants to pursue this path will have to make decisions about how he or she wants to balance competing objectives: taking risks and finding security, personal life and career, idealism and compromise, service to the larger community and concern for self. I have weighed these choices in many circumstances, in large career shifts and in the small everyday decisions that shape a life. I hope that sharing my experience will inspire readers, make these choices less lonely and daunting, and encourage them to do the inner work needed to be able to make those choices more wisely.

As I walked from the Dalai Lama’s residence to the Kashmir Cottage, the guest house where I was staying, on a path that followed 4the contour of the hill between the snowcapped mountains and the plains of northern India, I reflected on the long meandering path that had brought me to this remote place and prepared me to be a responsive participant in this unlikely conversation.

After I left the practice of law in a prestigious Washington firm, I moved into the creation of public interest law firms and a new law school, then resurfaced as the president of a new foundation. In each of these positions I had the opportunity to work for social justice and challenge conventional thinking. As I launched these new ventures, I began to explore edges of personal growth and relationship that had been invisible to me when I was working in a highly structured, hierarchical law firm. At the time, those explorations seemed to be peripheral to the “real work” that I was doing as a public interest lawyer and institutional innovator, remote from my world of lawyer’s logic. Some of them were physical, drawing me out of the city and into primitive places. In others, I built up my inner resources through workshops grounded in psychoanalytic theory and in the human potential movement. Most important, I began to practice meditation regularly, sitting each morning in silence, finding a place of quiet within me that I could come back to during the course of a conflict-filled day. Later, as I undertook meditation retreats with wise teachers, I began to realize that my meditation practice was opening the possibility of the cultivation of wisdom.

As I looked back, I realized that some of my early experiences had already put me on the wisdom path, though I didn’t know it at the time. As a teenager I had found pockets of serenity in the summer by going to a remote camp on an island in central Ontario. I was intrigued by the elegance and simplicity of the canoe—its shape, its cedar ribs and flooring, the taut canvas of its skin. In those Canadian summers I developed an abiding love of the interlocking lakes, streams, and marshes of the northern wilderness. It was on 5this island, too, away from home and my life of right angles and logical analysis, that I met Susan, who later became my wife, and fell in love with her grace, cheerful optimism, and infectious laugh.

I saw that this was where I first experienced moments of deep inner peace and an intuitive intimation that all life on earth is interconnected and interdependent. Those shadowy beginnings of perception in my teen years were the seeds that germinated years later, pushing through the hard-packed soil of intellectual sophistication, ambitious striving, and professional success.

My extracurricular explorations began to affect the ways in which I did my work, becoming a critical component of my effectiveness rather than a diversion or respite. These explorations were laying the foundations for my practice of wisdom. I found that in the midst of turmoil I was able to respond to strong pressure with less anger and reactivity. I was able to see things more clearly. I was able to empathize with a broader range of people and identify the things we shared. This book is about my progressive efforts to reintegrate the part of myself that had awakened in the lakes of northern Ontario with the activist and social entrepreneur.

Each of us can return to points in our lives when we had an awakening—an insight that suggested that the world was larger than what we had thought it was. Often these are not the sort of incidents that show up on our résumés, and we sometimes don’t talk about them with the people we work with. By sharing such incidents in my life, I want to encourage each of us to lift up such events, to reflect on how they enrich our lives and how they can be more fully integrated into our work for a more peaceful and just world.

Since moving to California at the start of the new millennium, I have increased my efforts to integrate the practice of wisdom with 6my activist engagement in the world. Although there are many paths to the practice of wisdom, this book maps the guideposts that have been most relevant to me, giving me resources to confront the inevitable crises that have arisen in my personal life and in the public sphere.

Practicing wisdom involves aligning work with values, what the Buddhists speak of as “right livelihood.” It often involves taking risks and being willing to act independently, outside the limits of conventional thinking—particularly in this time of self-absorbed individualism.

Practicing wisdom demands a commitment to keeping life in balance. That means living fully in order to develop a wide range of human capacities, emotional as well as cognitive, the heart, the spirit, and the body as well as the mind.

Practicing wisdom requires time for reflection and introspection. Meditation and other contemplative practices are tested methods to cultivate an inner silence and presence in which wisdom can evolve.

As wisdom practice develops, clarity of vision emerges. We hold our ideas more lightly and see reality more clearly, less circumscribed by our inherited screens and filters, biases and preferences. We become more comfortable living with paradox, holding dissonant views.

Wisdom practice makes the interconnection of all people more apparent. We recognize that all people have in common the desire to be happy and secure, an insight that promotes kindness and compassion.

Another dimension of wisdom practice is the recognition of imper-manence and the constancy of change. Finally, wisdom practice helps us accept the limits of our understanding?.nd the importance of humility, acknowledging the mystery that surrounds us.

I hope that the practice of wisdom will lead to the creation of a new activism, one that is more grounded in compassion and community and less grounded in anger and divisiveness. Each person who brings the practice of wisdom to her work can be more effective and balanced, and together we can build organizations and strategies that are more sustainable and less polarizing.

Wisdom practice is particularly valuable as we confront the radical discontinuities of the twenty-first century—terrorism, global climate disruption, the risk of pandemics, nuclear proliferation. Most of these threats can be anticipated but none can be controlled. Many people fall into fear and contraction, denial and hedonism, hopelessness and despair.

This book suggests that the practice of wisdom, though it doesn’t offer answers or assurance, can infuse our activism with the staying power to remain centered in the face of powerful forces pulling us away from the point of balance and compassion. An activism grounded in wisdom can provide the capacity to deal with the global crises that we increasingly face with clarity, courage, and hope. It can infuse our politics, our individual choices, and the way we live our lives.