Wisdom - Week 3
Where I listen to the voice of wisdom, reflecting on world events, the work of putting thoughts in order, and relationships between knowledge and disgust.
Wisdom says, do what you need. I made a mistake with a new alarm-clock. I planned a sleep in to recover from a few bad nights, but accidentally left it on at 7:00. ‘Might as well get up,’ I think, but all I can picture is a zombie day with mushy brain where I achieve nothing. So, I lie back down, and relax into dreams until 9:00. I get up then, ready for a shorter day, with the prospect of getting something done.
Wisdom says, do the thing. I reach home at 8pm after evening calls with Europe. I’m tired and I want Netflix. I spend 10 minutes selecting a show. Then realise I haven’t done my daily qi gong – a wisdom week commitment. Even one minute seems like a drag. I do it anyway. It lifts up my mood. So I set up to review one more text I had scheduled for the day, but left aside. Not to finalise it, just spend thirty minutes playing with it. It falls into place. Happiness oozes through me. Not that I did anything extraordinary. I just demonstrated to myself that I can hold commitments. Then, I settle into Netflix.
Wisdom says, be mindful of what you let in. The end of the week is shrouded by the mistake of watching the debate between Trump and Zelensky. I’ve got things to do, but emotions do their thing. Plus, I start judging myself for where my affect goes. I find myself blaming the Ukrainian president for acting too rashly. Why can’t he be more diplomatic? He’s in a weak position. Trump lacks generosity, Vance is a bully, all that is true. But couldn’t the good guy be smarter? Rather than a proud hero figure, I crave a snaky diplomat, one who could find the narrow path to fruitful negotiation between bad faith opponents. And make me feel better about the situation. Can’t he just let me remain in denial, that international relations are not ruled by justice, but wisdom at best.
I can’t unsee what I’ve seen though, and it simmers through the week-end. So by the end of the week, I start asking myself, what do you do when norms and expectations fall apart? When allies fight on live TV? When threats of gambling with World War III flu around. What does wisdom say then? Take the hint and shift to self-survival mode, or block the noise off and stay focused?
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‘You seem to surround yourself with the right people, and focus on what's important.’ I’m on a late evening call with a French friend’s French friend. The current is passing between us, as the French say, and I get a layer of praise in the bargain. When I pause to reflect, I agree with her. I’ve got my focus straight. But then I get sucked into the whirlwind of the world, and start wondering if I’ve got it all backwards. It’s all the harder as I chose to work on two major book projects with two different co-authors until Easter. I have to accept associated hiccups, tiredness, and delayed gratification.
It's a challenge I’ve spiralled around a number of times. I adopted a life in-between, with a balanced portfolio approach to my career and my hopes, rather than focusing on one problem, one role, one organisation. Not only that, but I help others understand their own complex situation by putting myself in their shoes. A direct consequence is that I often find myself off-centre. Through the week, I do daily meditations on the topic of ‘what do I want’, recentring my own life around me, so to speak. Not guided by some silly ‘think of number one first’ belief, but curiosity: what does the world look like from where I stand? What constellations appear? What potential emerges? Practically, I just extended to myself the type of attention I offer the people I work with. Wisdom says, do to yourself as you would others.
There’s two types of work, I reflect: creating something new, or organising what’s already there. Dionysus and Apollo. I had a session with an old friend over lunch on Monday. He’s an educator by training. ‘I help people gain confidence’, he said, when I asked him to reflect on his craft. ‘And I do that by helping them develop new skills.’ I presented my contribution, by contrast, as reflective. I don’t teach new things. I reorder. When I used to lecture and tutor, that quickly became my implicit model. I always assumed my students knew everything already, but vaguely. My role was not to place a new book on their mental shelf, but organise their inner library. Or rather, get them to reorganise it, through gentle prompting, role-modelling, and the occasional question. In that case, with that friend, it worked: ‘thank you for showing me what was already there,’ he said at the end of lunch. I get that often. Many people who come confused or looking for change end up realising they need only minor adjustments. Wisdom says, everything is already there.
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Wisdom says, the past is a good predictor of the future. Consequence: understanding history matters. Certain narratives serve us, to justify our position or comfort our beliefs. Justice, as I reflected in the last cycle, demands that we closely test those. Wisdom makes the same demand from another angle. If we hold a thing to be true because it resonates with our prejudice, we might not only make the wrong predictions and face unexpected outcomes. We could stand in the way of opportunities – letting collapse, oppression or polarisation present themselves as the only plausible scenarios.
Enter the caveman argument: myths we project on our distant past, about which we cannot know much for sure, as if they were self-evident truth. It's a thing all of us tend to do. The danger is not so much lies, but made up stuff presented as fact by seemingly reputable people, then repeated. In The Corporation in the 21st century – an otherwise excellent book – in a section on manufacturing and the role of physical labour, I read the following statement. ‘In prehistory, man hunted, fished and made primitive implements. His wife and children prospered if he was good at these things; if not, they languished or even died.’ The author adds: ‘Women also worked hard – perhaps harder – but it was the activity of men that was seen as economically productive.’ How does he know? Based on what sources can he say that prehistoric people perceived the activity of men as more economically productive? Or even that society was organised around nuclear families with husbands and wives? And why did the wives and children not hunt, fish or make tools? When framed in this manner, the absurdity of his statement is evident. Yet we keep forgetting, and rest our decisions on foundations of made-up knowledge. Maybe, that’s because our alternative would be to accept that most of what we know is nothing but a best probability, fragile knowledge resting on a small patch of mud adrift on shifting waterways.
I have this conversation with an old friend’s mentee. Our capacity to anticipate the future depends on overcoming blind spots. Some of them have to do with avoiding pain and grief. Others have to do with disgust. In the previous cycle, I wrote that intercultural wisdom requires that we overcome an aspiration to purity. The pursuit of wisdom more deeply requires that we look at what disgusts us. ‘I have a blind spot’, I share, ‘I find the people who insist on the need to reconcile making money and doing good irrationally repellent.’ Not that I’m caught in some belief that money is intrinsically dirty, but rather that in our current neoliberal capitalist system, aspirations to maximal social utility don’t mix well with aspirations to material wealth – like mayonnaise and chocolate cake. I would much rather keep those as distinct threads, and figure out how to pragmatically weave them. As a result of which, I regularly misinterpret behaviours, or put my foot in it, or keep myself apart and miss out. Come to think of it, this irrational disgust may well be why I chose a life in-between, rather than opting for one job, one focus, one organisation. Maybe there were options I didn’t see.
Wisdom says, try to know what’s coming. Speaking of disgust, on courage week, I went for a blood test. I’d also been invited to check for a thing called occult faecal blood, which involves stool testing. Over three days, I had to gather samples in a plastic container, insert a little serrated pick, place it back in a tube, and keep that in the fridge. Changing my nomadic routines and co-working habits was inconvenient for sure. Though mostly, disgust. Wisdom says, knowledge comes at a cost.