Blog Post #10: Knowledge vs. Wisdom

 How do We Navigate Through Life?: Knowledge vs. Wisdom

      

       Throughout our lives we gain bits of knowledge and wisdom here and there, but what exactly is knowledge and wisdom? Knowledge can be the accumulation of general facts and information we learn in school or read on the Internet, but wisdom is information we can only gain through experience. For instance, when we learn how to ride a bike, we are told what to do, but we don’t gain the wisdom of actually being able to ride a bike until we grab the handlebars and push the pedals ourselves. We can all learn knowledge, but it takes having an experience to gain wisdom. 

In Gawande’s Being Mortal, Gawande elaborates on the struggle of telling his patients that they are going to face inevitable death. He holds all the needed knowledge on the different treatment options each patient has, but he lacks the wisdom on how to have the deep conversation with his patients on how they want to deal with their eminent deaths. As he deals with patients, such as Jewel Douglass, who have terminal illnesses, Gawande becomes more comfortable talking to his terminally ill patients about the gravity of their situations, but does not fully understand how to have or approach the “hard conversation” of telling his patients that they are going to face death. However, when Gawande’s father’s health dives from cancer, Gawande is faced with having the hard conversation with his father about his eminent death. As the hospice nurse talks with Gawande’s father about his discomforts, what he wants to accomplish despite his complications, and what he wants after death, Gawande is awestruck by the bluntness of the nurse. Despite the nurse’s seemingly bleak yet honest outlook on Gawande’s father’s death, her taking the time to have the “hard conversation” with Gawande’s father allowed Gawande’s father to not only live longer and accomplish what he wanted, but also clarified how he wanted to end his life. Through this experience and the experience of carrying out his father’s dying wishes, Gawande gained the wisdom needed to approach eminent death. He learned how to guide his patients towards dealing with the reality of their deaths and how to make the most of their remaining life. What his knowledge on treatments and medicine couldn’t provide, he learned through the wisdom gained from dealing with his father’s death. Although knowledge is needed to teach us about life, it is the irreplaceable wisdom we gain through experience that teaches us how to live our life to the fullest.