ABOUT WISDOM JOURNALS

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

Harry has Dumbledore, Luke has Obi-Wan and Yoda, Frodo has Gandalf. Who do you have to guide you? If you could have a mentor who would it be?

Wisdom Journals distill the wisdom of the ages, ancient and recent, in a way that you are certain to find life changing advice.

Wisdom comes from without, and from within. That is why Journals combine pivotal insights with daily prompts to foster self-transformation..

These journals are ideal gifts, from you to someone you care about, or, even better, a gift to yourself.

KEVIN WILKINS: ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I cannot understand how some people can live without communicating with the wisest people who ever lived on Earth? – Leo Tolstoy

A little over twenty years ago, I stumbled across some letters of from an older and wiser person to someone obviously younger and I knew I had found a guide. That the letters were not addressed to me specifically, and that they were written two thousand years ago was of no concern, the lessons within resonated loudly and clearly. The letters were Seneca’s Epistles; letters of advice he wrote to a youth named Lucilius. Seneca led to a broader array of mentors, a former Emperor (Marcus Aurelius), a former slave (Epictetus), philosophers such as Aristotle and Kierkegaard, as well as influential psychologists such as Adler, Fromm, Rollo May and Jordan Peterson.

A few years ago, I sat down to write a book for my children. I sought to summarize some essential life lessons, things that I wished that I had known as a young person. I wanted to give them a manual of living for sorts, the type of book I would have liked to have as a young adult (this despite the fact that in all likelihood I would have dismissed any such work as propaganda at the time. With a few decades under my belt, I now agree with Oscar Wilde – I am not young enough to know everything).

As I progressed with this book, working through the question of what one must know to lead a good life, I found myself coming to the same conclusions of these cherished guides. They were often cited at the head of each chapter; their pithy statements expressed what I did in thousands of words. That book of dialogues (publication pending) and the story it tells weaves together much of the best advice I could find about key life themes such as love, education, friendship, work, health, and money.

However, I observed that the act of writing was a more powerful learning tool than reading alone. What I learned is that wisdom is as much, or more, of a ‘how’ than a ‘what.’ The lessons within these quotes and proverbs are best assimilated through the act of writing on the theme as reading it alone. Hence, these journals. Writing forces us out of our inner monologue, we engae in a dialogue between our current self and our ideal self, or between our public self and our authentic self. The wisdom quotes in your personal Wisdom Journal bring the wisest minds of all time into the conversation.