In Still Life, the first of her Inspector Armand Gamache mysteries, Louise Penny has him say: “There are four things that lead to wisdom. . . . They are four sentences we learn to say and mean . . . . I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

These are simple sentences, but they are not easy to say and mean, since they are straightforward admissions of our limits.

I don’t know: There’s knowledge I don’t have, and there are problems I can’t solve. There are puzzles I can’t put together and mysteries I can’t pierce.  

I need help: There are more demands than I can shoulder and greater needs than I can meet. I lack the strength and energy to do what my circumstances require of me.

I’m sorry, and I was wrong: What I said hurt you, what I did damaged you, and what I didn’t do broke your heart. Will you forgive me?

It’s wise and merciful to respect our own and others’ limits, but, very often, they are a source of shame, the kind of shame that generates paralyzing depression or superficial cheerfulness or swaggering bravado or performative (self-) righteousness. In some people, shame works to steel a resistance to admit wrongdoing and to drive both aggressive and passive-aggressive cruelty.

Even at our strongest and healthiest, we’re all fragile. To use a scriptural metaphor, we’re made from the dust of the ground; we’re clay creatures, susceptible to brokenness. We know, or eventually will, the hurt of broken bodies, wounded hearts, weakened wills, and fractured minds.

Even at our most competent and wisest, we’re all fallible, too. We get things wrong, and we go wrong. We lose track of the truth and struggle to reclaim it. Some of us have moral and spiritual cataracts; our perceptions of ourselves, others, and the world are clouded by our shadowy self-centeredness or dulled imaginativeness.

People who strive for integrity respond with compassion, skill, and resources when people need help. They collaborate with others to discover ways to meet challenges for which their own knowledge is inadequate. They have the capacity to recognize, often because others risk “speaking the truth in love” to them, when they have made bad decisions or misplaced their ambitions or confused their loyalties, to seek forgiveness, and to change direction.

That kind of integrity matters for all of us, particularly for leaders.  From my own attempts to lead, I know how tempting it is to pretend that the limits don’t apply to oneself and how easy it is to become insensitive to the limits of others. I also know how freeing it has been to say: “I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong.” I long to hear leaders, especially, these days, political leaders, summon the courage to say them.

I can only imagine how shocked into unexpected hopefulness I would be if, for instance, the President of the United States would say and mean: “I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”