The Conversation Library: Live Wisely

What does it mean to live wisely when life rarely gives us simple choices?

We make decisions every day—about work and money, success and failure, relationships and responsibility, disagreement and uncertainty, what to hold on to and what to let go. Yet the choices that shape a life are often made when there is no perfect answer.

The Conversation Library: Live Wisely brings eighteen such questions to a remarkable table.

Visitors arrive carrying problems drawn from ordinary life. Around the table, they encounter Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha, Rumi, Viktor Frankl, Hannah Arendt, Marcus Aurelius and other enduring voices of human wisdom, with Cowan as their host. They do not offer easy formulas or tell the visitors how to live. They question, challenge, disagree and help each person see the problem differently.

Through these conversations, Live Wisely explores what happens when plans fail, when certainty disappears, when money complicates our choices, when people we care about disagree with us, when life asks us to change direction, and when we must decide what truly matters.

This is not a book of commandments for a good life. Nor does it promise that wisdom will remove life's difficulties. It begins from a more modest possibility: that we can learn to meet those difficulties with greater clarity, perspective and humanity.