Wisdom – Week 7
Where I look back to the year so far, and reflect on focus, disgust, resistance, and self-awareness
Halfway through this project, I decided to look back and read through my first six posts: what I did, what I learned, and what new insights emerged about wisdom. Three main threads came together:
Focus. Wisdom is living life on a higher level of definition. Which requires labelling and sequencing our actions better. It’s taking on the responsibility to set our own measures of success, manage our cycles and milestones, and test the limits of what is in our power to control and influence.
Disgust. Wisdom comes at a cost. We must trade innocence for knowledge. If we’re serious about learning, we must engage with gooey nature, taste weird foods, and spend time in a state of shapeless confusion. We must align our mental models on our lived experience of reality – even when reality seems odd or embarrassing. And for a moment at least, we must suspend our certainties.
Resistance. Wisdom is both caution and power. We’re more ignorant than we think, weaker, and more vulnerable: as individuals and as societies. The separation of power is an illusion, the news an addictive drama, while the digital world is lurking to trap us in. But we can lean on inherited frameworks – and the discipline of virtue – to build up strength and resist. If the world falls apart around us, we might at least stay sane and lucid as it does.
Beyond this general understanding of wisdom, I learned a few more personal things.
I don’t do well with rigid discipline. My rhythms are erratic. I do my best when I follow my body, and keep a sense of spaciousness around me. In fact, it’s precisely because I have cultivated trust in my body that I don’t follow discipline rigidly. I know that I can let the process unfold.
I should place my attention on rest. I tend to keep my commitments, to myself and others, and tackle what I need. But I don’t always pause enough, to celebrate what I got done, and regenerate. Then I can fall into the trance. I need deliberate pauses, to reconnect with what I’m doing. Or in other words, rest is a priority.
As someone interested in Stoic tradition, I noted that I have atypical references. To reflect on discipline, I prefer cooking or fashion to sports. To reflect on commitments, I prefer friendship to marriage. More fundamentally, I have pagan liking for excess, which I believe is part of wisdom. Multiple times, I found myself eating and drinking too much intentionally, as a way to reset. I believe that we need such rituals to let loose our inner predator, and remind ourselves of our dark instincts, so they do not blindside us.
Finally, one thing angers me particularly: caveman arguments, or any form of prejudice projected on the past as self-evident truth. As I wrote, ‘The danger is not so much lies, but made up stuff presented as fact by seemingly respectable people.’ Who knows, it might be that I care about thinking, writing, and ideas.