Becoming Wise by Krista Tippett

"I’m not sure there’s such a thing as the cultural 'center,' nor that it’s very interesting if it exists. But left of center and right of center, in the expansive middle and heart of our life together, most of us have some questions left alongside our answers, some curiosity alongside our convictions. This book is for people who want to take up the great questions of our time with imagination and courage, to nurture new realities in the spaces we inhabit, and to do so expectantly and with joy."

In Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett has created a master class in living for a fractured world. Fracture, she says, is not the whole story of our time. The enduring question of what it means to be human has become inextricable from the challenge of who we are to one another. She insists on the possibility of personal depth and common life for this century, nurtured by science and “spiritual technologies,” with civility and love as muscular public practice. And, accompanied by a cross-disciplinary dream team of a teaching faculty, she shows us how.

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Why I Picked It Up

I like a lot of Krista Tippett’s work in On Being. I feel similarly about her as I do Aeon or Maria Popova. They’re publications and figures that host conversations that just get it, whatever “it” is. Resonance, grace, wisdom, everything I want.

I’ve been grappling with more coming-of-age style questions lately for myself i.e. questioning what I consider good or right. I’m trying to relax my standards of perfectionism and have probably, more importantly, become way less defensive over the last few years in that I don’t feel as much need to correct when I feel someone has misunderstood me. I think frequently of wisdom as being grace in practice.

I picked up Becoming Wise in a week when I felt a little off, and it’s actually a great book for that purpose: for being re-settled, or newly calibrated. As I wrote when I first read it last year, “I always radiate intense energy at the end of my book drafts, which makes me more self-conscious than normal too.” At the time I read this, I wanted something that would address the feeling of being too uncomfortably zoomed in for too long. Tunnel vision, baby!

About the Book

Each section focuses on a given topic and how it relates to the practice or definition of wisdom. Love, hope, words, flesh, faith, etc. (I do not love the word flesh, lol, but she means embodiment, which has been a theme of my year as well.)

I think the book is likely most effective if you view it as many scattered conversations versus a volume stitched together by a common theme, although the glue here is Tippett’s particular curatorial eye, which is lovely. People have different views of what wisdom and meaning entail in the first place, and wise is one of those words that you can’t pursue yourself. As in, it’s a title that must be bestowed upon you, and that instinct to flinch away from the labeling process intrudes a little upon the idea of reading or writing a book around the topic. The book gets a pass here 1) because I like Krista Tippett a lot and believe it and 2) because it pulls from so many interviews, which keeps it feeling like a question rather than a take.

Obviously, Krista Tippett talks about many thinkers, and she holds the same view I do about relativism in that worldviews can exist in contradiction. Similarly, I liked her following the thread that psych and science are confirming, not denying, a lot of the mysticism and abstraction we innately feel—these gut-deep truths we instinctively shape our lives around without realizing how profoundly we’re wired to care about those things.

Ex: Being kind makes us happy, purpose and relationship to others makes us happiest, etc.

The study: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-10484-006.

I’m actually surprised she didn’t go more into awe (my personal obsession) as that study is a similar glue that stitches together our understanding of ourselves.

Also, if I ever taught a college class, I would print out or scan or force everyone to read the chapter on beauty and why it matters—and she appropriately distinguishes beauty from glamour, which I think would be extremely clarifying to many readers who might not understand why I see beauty and aesthetics as a crucial value.

I also think and talk a lot about distillation, and how beauty clarifies essence. The book was worth it even for this one quote about the fig that’s absolutely dominated my year (and no, it’s not the fig tree metaphor): simplicity on this side of complexity.

For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

This quote resonated with me enough that I did a mind map for it that briefly concerned my psychiatrist. But yeah, this is how my brain works when I read, and Becoming Wise was timely for me in a bit of an existential storm. It is possibly my absolute favorite quote, or the one I feel is most “me.”

A companion piece on The On Being Project itself even mapped out how Mary Oliver’s poetry embodies this philosophy which makes total sense to me now. So many great tidbits.

Voice & Tone

Like Popova, Tippett can be a little flowery, and you can tell which lines perhaps are written to be lines. I do appreciate an emphasis on styled prose, so I’m usually generous as a reader there.

Tippett focuses a lot on religious or spiritual belief as a catalyst to her conversations in this one (and often in general), but also regularly incorporates poets, neuroscientists, historians, etc. to flesh out her idea of what’s important.

Tippett also has some great points about how compiling this book overall is just as illuminative to her original thoughts on each of these topics surrounding “wisdom” as what she initially came in with. (I resonated with Marcus Aurelius for similar reasons—an idea of work-in-progress.)

Aspects like the willingness to put hard things down into words, how the best way to learn something is to teach (i.e. write) it. That we believe whatever we argue. An openness to being wrong, and the acceptance that your mind can, will, and should change in the future. Also, that not all questions ask for immediate answers! Often, we’re tempted towards the idea of a conclusion too quickly (probably exacerbated by a take-heavy culture, as has been a discussion among many writers publishing online.)

Overall Thoughts

Becoming Wise is a good primer kind of book, especially at transitional periods like the turning point of a year. It's conversational in most moments as it centers around interviews, although Tippett's reflections are poetic and clear to read (in a way that you might appreciate When Breath Becomes Air.)

If you're feeling off, it might recenter you. If you want a good, inspirational (but not corny) book to kick off the year, it's probably a good conversation to start off 2026.

For fans of:

The Nature Fix by Florence Williams; Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui; Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman; Awe by Dacher Keltner; etc.