By Stuart James Whitley | Bio
Continuing on from yesterday's post....
2. Be patient
As
the Biblical injunction provides, all things good come to those who
wait. This precondition for good temperament has two elements to it:
time and wisdom. Part of wisdom is the understanding that
active listening is a form of generosity, a key element in a mature
temperament. Waiting for the other point of view, the various possible
perspectives, or even the depletion of emotion, takes discipline.
Deferring
to the other also allows the settlement of what one might call the
heart’s intuitions. As Pascal said: “The heart has its reasons that
reason does not know.” This is behind the ancient nursery rhyme:
There was an old owl that lived in an oak
The more he heard, the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard
Oh if only more folks were like that wise old bird…
The other aspect of patience has to do with one’s use of time.
I remember reading in school that Marcus Aurelius, the brilliant Roman
general of the second century, would take along a separate tent,
candles and writing materials on his campaigns. Each night, no matter
how difficult or bloody the day had been, he would retire to this
private place and think, collecting his thoughts and writing them down.
Some of his brilliant insights appear in his Meditations. In
other words, creating the time and space to think things through is
essential to understanding, and bespeaks the necessary patience to
acquire it. 3. Be respectful.The third canon
involves taking responsibility, deference, tolerance and good manners.
The latter is a visible signal that respect is operating as a channel
for all else. There’s a wonderful insight from Shaw in Pygmalion that better expresses the point:
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners
or good manners, but having the same manner
for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were
in heaven, where there are no third-class carriages,
and one soul is as good as another.
There
is a difference between deference and servility. There are many
instances in which it is both fair and appropriate to defer to the
views of another, without the question of who is right being
necessarily decided. This routinely occurs in politics, friendships,
marriages and other relationships, in which the damage done by
intransigence is far worse than that which may occur by deference.
Sometimes it is not always enough—or even important—to be right on an
issue. Beware the person with an infantile sense of justice.
The maturity to take responsibility for what is essentially a moral
duty to defer in some circumstances is, in many respects, the hardest
thing for children to learn, as it engages their sense of fairness.
Pasternak ( To Friends East and West) captures the lesson: He comes as a guest to the feast of existence,
and knows that what matters is not how much
he inherits, but how he behaves at the feast,
and what people remember and love him for.
In my next post, I’ll formulate three rules for good thinking.
© 2009 Stuart J. Whitley. All rights reserved.
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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By Stuart James Whitley | Bio
Always a fan of pith & substance, when I wrote out the three rules for a good living in my last post (Wolf’s Theorem),
it occurred to me that the same formula might apply to the development
of good temperament. In common parlance, ‘temperament’ is the kind of
person we are. One supposes it’s what Shakespeare had in mind when he
bid Hamlet say: “Come, give us a taste of your quality.” (Act II, Scene
ii)
Temperament is more formally defined in the Oxford Concise
dictionary as the individual character of one’s constitution that
permanently affects the manner of acting, feeling and thinking. Matters
it seems to me entirely within our control, though occasionally there
are examples to the contrary: “He’s hot-headed”, “She’s selfish”, “He’s
impulsive”, and so on. And it is true that we seem to have
characteristics that in some measure define us: we are sometimes graced
with artistic talent, physical presence or an ability to think clearly
under certain conditions. The options are infinite. Regardless, we hold
the reins to the outer expression of those qualities—or
frailties—entirely within our grip, barring mental disorder or lesion
in the cerebral cortex.
In Yiddish (as in many languages and
cultures), there are many words to describe someone of even
temperament—but the Jews nail it with the exuberant term ‘mensch’. A
‘mensch’ is someone with an admirable character, observable rectitude,
dignity, possessing a sense of what is right, responsible, calm and
decorous. I contend there are three simple rules to qualify—valid in
any culture:
1. Know yourself.
The first of these
three dicta is probably the most important, and was an old charge when
Aristotle expressed it in his teachings. The capacity to take a
personal inventory has to be developed through teaching,
self-instruction and introspection. To do it takes a form of wisdom.
Everyone is familiar with Polonius’ instruction to his son Laertes when
he is about to leave home, which reads in part:
This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man,
(Hamlet, Act I: Scene iii)
Now, there’s a trick here: we’re all capable of self-deception.
The Nobel philosopher/physicist Feynman said, “The first principle is
that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to
fool.” Others have riffed off this, contending sensibly that, rather
than trying to attain some verifiable truth (which is not a truth
inside us, but a truth among us), a primary value of modern everyday
life is to not fool ourselves or cheat ourselves into believing
something. Perhaps this is what Anais Nin meant when she said, “We
don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
If one
knows oneself, one knows as a matter of course what we are committed
to. And commitments are the only sure way of bring the future into
being, including the kind of person we want to be.
More tomorrow… © 2009 Stuart J. Whitley. All rights reserved.
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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By Stuart Whitley | Bio
the man with the unpressed suit and upraised arms
speaking in monotone, knows exits and oxygen masks
the woman in the seat beside me moulds latex
into monsters’ heads for movies, and wonders
if she has time for a Harvey’s hamburger, loaded,
before her bags arrive on the carousel
do these people have wisdom?
five miles below, a man scratches earth from dinosaur bones
and another scutters down darkened lanes breaking car windows
looking for glitter, running from the alarm’s wail, laughing
is there wisdom in knowing what to look for?
is there the slightest wisdom in getting away with something?
when the magi set off to honour the birth of an unknown child
were they wise because they knew what no one else knew?
the natural way is the wisest way, the old cultures have it
but are my instincts wiser than those of the ebola virus?
the lawyer wielding principle like a club seems wise
though reason may be just to the cause, it is cruel to the man
is a judge wise to discern the difference, or wiser to ignore it?
every child believes that darkness is scary and the enemy’s evil
that strangers will hurt you but loved ones will not
can the seeds of wisdom possibly lie in what everyone thinks to be so?
are we wise when we’ve learned our lesson, or acknowledged mistakes?
does any part of wisdom lie in relinquishment, regret or longing or pain?
is it only then that the truest value of a thing is taken?
do we know wisdom to see it? can we teach or acquire it?
is it the same as feeling or sensing or waiting or wanting?
is it somewhere near the sum of experience?
having it, are we happier, richer, sexier or more clever?
or is it an abstract, like Baffin, familiar but remote?
wisdom, I think, is a version of sorrow, a burden
a state of mind edged with sadness, even as it knows joy
more believing than knowing, more patience than insistence
it is seeking to understand, and be understood,
the divinity that is discovered in ourselves, and in others
and finally:
wisdom is a reverence for what is essential in the human condition
which is why this love, this bottomless love of ours, is so wise © 2002 Stuart J. Whitley. All rights reserved.
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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 By Stuart J. Whitley | Bio
Ethics concerns the attempt by disciplined
discernment to identify moral options available in a given case, around
which there is some general agreement. Professional societies and other
groups, through statements of ethical standards or codes of conduct,
attempt to assert rules about rightness of conduct that rise above the
minimum standards of the law. This is most often referred to as
‘applied ethics’. [ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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By Stuart J. Whitley | Bio
About
three years ago, I assisted an aboriginal woman elder with a
presentation she was doing for the media. She was trying to explain the
role of justice as conceived by the first peoples of this continent.
Paraphrasing her: first, she said, there is the sky over all of us,
then there is the water below. What takes our breath away when we look
to the rivers and the forests is the same thing that possesses us when
we think about the wonder inside our own bodies. As the moon compels
the oceans with forces we can feel (if not fully understand), so is
every atom of water linked one to the other in performing the essential
tasks that the living earth needs. A rainstorm in the mountains stirs
our blood. What we do to the pond in the slough where the horses graze,
we do to the world. As goes the fate of the smallest creek, goes the
fate of us all. All things are connected. [ Read More]
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I met Stu about 5 years ago as a client in a course I was leading for
the Canadian Department of Justice. He not only contributed, but also
took the conversation to a much higher and more constructive level.
Since then, we’ve become friends and I am always inspired and a little
in awe of the breadth of his intellect, talent and vision. More
importantly, he is a great human being that cares deeply about our
future. Stuart is currently working on his next novel set in
Canada in the '90s and Poland during the war. This Vancouver-based
lawyer has taught at law school, and was the editor of a professional
journal for 8 years. In addition to two legal textbooks and many
professional articles, he has published two novels, Climates of Our Birth (Watson & Dwyer: 1994) and A Reckoning of Angels
(Great Plains: 2000), which won the 2001 McWilliams Prize for Best
Historical Fiction. He also contributed to a three-volume popular
history of Manitoba, and has written for Nuvo Magazine and other periodicals.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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