Wisdom – Week 1

In 2025, I will explore the four cardinal virtues from the Aristotelian, Stoic and Catholic tradition – wisdom, moderation, justice, courage – in thirteen cycles of four weeks, and share my learnings in the form of a reflective meditation. 

On New Year’s Eve, I drank too much. Moderation would come later. I fell on the bed at 1am, leaving Philip to dance with our guests. To my discharge, there weren’t many left by then. Besides, it was the right occasion to indulge in ritual excess. Humans are exuberant creatures – at least in my tradition – and must occasionally step into the realm of ‘too much’, to reset our system. What better time than our annual open-door New Year’s Eve party?  

I was talking with a friend a few days earlier, while we sat for lunch in a grass clearing of the Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenongs. One of my blessings is that I can trust my body, and learned early that it sometimes needs to just do its thing. Even as a teenager, and later when I went through dark patches, I would know to let emotions flush through me, while I sat and waited. I would return to my usual happy self after a couple of hours, at most a day or two, through the good luck of natural buoyancy. Wisdom: do nothing, and let the process unfold. 

This may be the upside of high sensitivity. My ‘too much’ comes fast. I drink three glasses of wine, and I hiccup. I smoke one cigarette, and I cough out my lungs. I stretch a little emotionally or cognitively, and I have to pause. I have worked with high achievers. Many shared similar stories of fainting at airports or other ways for the body to collapse unexpectedly. I used to admire so much drive, but then learned to feel for them. Their body gave no early warning signals, until they hit a wall. It was one less thing they could trust. 

But what else can we trust? Especially when we do something original, meaningful, or new. I found myself reading Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists over the first days of January. In one chapter, he highlights the work of development economist Esther Duflo. She revolutionised aid efforts by conducting randomized control trials to test what interventions work best – whether for taking people out of poverty, lifting education levels, or any other outcomes. Even so, most programs – most human endeavours in fact – operate on educated guess work, based not on facts but ideology. Problem is, we’re often deluded about that. This is what I also learned from writing a PhD: we know so little about the world, especially when we believe we do. By that I mean, it’s not that me, or you, or that person over there, is ignorant of something because we haven’t yet read the right paper or accessed the source of truth. We collectively don’t know. The world is opaque. We have models that sometimes map reality to an extent. We have some data that is not too far off the mark. That’s about it, in an ocean of noise. And yet we must make decisions, all the time. Intuition anchored in the body – subtle signals, gut instincts, wider ways of knowing, muscular tensions warning us when our models clash with reality – is a critical fount of wisdom to triangulate what we think we know. In order to access that wisdom, we must cultivate trust in our bodies. 

As part of this project, each week, I will set myself two physical goals. One is building core strength to lift up my vitality. Through the year, first thing in the morning, I will do a small set of standard exercises – squats, sit ups, push ups, etc – starting with six reps, and gradually building up to a number I can maintain with minimal strain. The other will vary week to week. To train wisdom, I decided to practice Zhan Zhuang, or standing qi gong. I started lightly, standing for just a few minutes each day in an open arm pose. In stillness, I paid close attention to the flows of energy through me, nurturing the habit of listening to my body, sense structural tensions or misalignments, and either correct them, ground them, or be mindful of them.  

Setting this physical routine is one of the driving forces for this year long project. In 2024, I had decided to build strength, and enrolled at a gym for resistance training. It started well, until I got a tennis elbow. I paused and tried a morning home routine instead. Fat chance: even a daily sun salutation felt too much. By attaching physical exercises to the practice of virtue, I have externalised my commitment. I can grab on this outside framework, so to speak, to lift myself up in the morning, and get the thing done. Wisdom: build a system in your moments of strength, then lean on it in your moments of weakness. 

In conversations with the same friend I was in Belgrave with, we’ve often discussed how meeting commitments is a sure way to build self-confidence. Setting goals and keeping them builds character strength. Which means, goals must be set wisely. If we default on them, our inner liveliness will dwindle. Wisdom is the art of deciding what to do. 

I call this an art, because folding things in the right manner is a form of artistry. This year with cardinal virtue came fully formed, so to speak, as part of my usual late December effort at closing the past year, and setting up the new. There was a long list of things I was hoping to do in 2025. I know that too much is the enemy of done. I also know that ‘too much’ is more quality than quantity. Clarity can increase capacity by orders of magnitude. By framing those aspirations under four keywords – wisdom, moderation, justice, courage – I hope to do more than if I let pure chaos reign. 

In 2017, when I first engaged with wisdom, in a past iteration of this year’s project, I spent my first week intentionally focusing on exactly what I was trying to do in the moment, all through the day. I soon realised how much of my time was spent vaguely. Doing things by force of habit, responding to some external impulse, or multi-tasking in a state of confusion. By mentally labelling what I was doing and why, I could be more present, and let the process happen: do more with less effort. When I was confused, or tried to pursue things through force of will, I worked against myself, and crashed rapidly. Funnily enough, a version of that happened when writing this very post. I delayed the writing to the end of moderation week, where I had set a day of fasting (more on this to come). I failed to realise that a day without food – inexperienced as I am with fasting – would clash with the demands of focused writing. I was very grumpy. Listening to my inner wisdom, I chose to keep the fast – commitment made in a moment of strength – and delay the writing. 

Whatever ‘to do’ lingers now anyway, I have courage week for, where I will tackle the things I’ve pushed away. Right from the beginning, in fact, I’ve started to feel how the four virtues work together. Wisdom to set goals, courage to get things over the line, because goals unmet become clutter. Right before starting this project, I culled about a hundred books from my library, sorted through my clothes, and brought boxes to the op shop. I also completed my commitments for the past year. I had one task left hanging. I’ve been incubating a program called ‘First Followers’, to train and lift up the profiles of people working in emerging environments, not as founders but early supporters. I had promised myself to finish a draft by the end of 2024. On the morning of the 31, that is exactly what I did – and I felt an immediate surge of life.

Managing energy flows is a key challenge to getting things done. There is wisdom in changing gears, but also setting time aside to rest. For years, I’ve flagged my poor capacity to rest as my primary limiting factor. I suffer from insomnia, which typically comes as a result of trying to do too much in one day: my body sets its own boundaries, and brings me back to balance. Yet I only lean into rest reluctantly, and keep trying to sneak in a few hours of work. So this year, I will experiment with a ‘floating Sabbath’: five firm days a month, to do no work at all, with an extra five half days, and five extra days working entirely to my own schedule. Block them off in my calendar, and be firm. After all, I freelance, and have to be responsible for my own schedule.  

I did that on a short trip to Torquay, right after the new year. I committed to half a day of writing – in which I put together the tagline of this Substack and my blog. Saturday was a proper day off. Oh, I was tempted to sneak off and write a draft of this post, but instead, lazed in the glamping tent with my partner, wandered off to town, and munched on pastry by the beach. Things people tend to regret on their death bed are not that a piece of work was delayed by a few days. Or as the Gospel says, the poor will always be with you.

I tried my new tagline with a few friends. In the first draft, I used the word ‘virtue ethics’. Two of them pointed that the word felt alienating. I replaced it with inherited traditions. For the same reason, I’ll use ‘wisdom’ instead of ‘prudence’ and ‘moderation’ instead of ‘temperance’: greater relatability. In the text body, though, I feel that I can indulge in some pedantry. Virtue relates etymologically to the Latin root ‘Vir’, referring to the force of life present in nature – fecund viriditas. Virtue is not squeamish or prude, but geared towards abundance. It is in the service of magis – doing more. It is about exuberance and excess. This, therefore, is also what I came to understand about wisdom as a virtue. That it is not self-limiting caution, but an attempt at multiplying activity, where we can find more joy and more connection with the world. Part of it is setting up systems and structures to lift ourselves up and contain our delusion. Part of it is also, when confused, all other things being equal, and if the body doesn’t speak clearly otherwise, to lean into the ride of life, at the risk of excess velocity. At least, it is wise do this as long as we cultivate moderation, to refine our senses and regulate our appetite. Which is where the next post will take us. 

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Please leave comments or reach out if any of this resonates with you – and don’t hesitate to share this with your friends and networks.