Becoming Wise is supported by the Fetzer Institute.

I've had hundreds of big conversations, and my conversation partners share wisdom I carry with me wherever I go.

The physicist Leonard Mladenow changed the way I think about the agency we have in shaping our own

destinies. As a scientist, he works with principles like Brownian motion, by which Einstein helped

verify the existence of molecules and atoms. And as the child of Holocaust survivors, he dances with

the experience we all have

that life never goes as it's planned,

and yet the choices we make can matter.

This is becoming wise.

I'm Krista Tippett.

Music Tippett.

You write about your father's, a story he told you about how he got the job in the bakery at Bukenval,

at the concentration camp.

His sense that this was just random.

But tell that story.

Oh, that was in the drunkard's walk.

And the book is about randomness in life.

And to me, you know, when I was thinking about writing that book I was almost shaken by the realization that that I'm you know a random effect of something very bad and I hope that for me I'm

glad I'm here but I'm only here because Hitler and the Nazis killed my father's

previous family, and that led to my being here.

And that was a very hard thing to face in a way that what's the meaning of my life

when it arose from something like that?

...