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
Tagged with:
intuition
justice
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wisdom
By Stuart J. Whitley |
Bio
I
read somewhere that good decision-making—indeed, good relations—depends
upon a virtuous cycle of respect, trust and candour (which takes some
time to establish, but which can easily be interrupted). Attitude,
after all, is everything. Perhaps that last statement needs a bit of
refinement: the ethical attitude is everything. By that
I mean the determination of the answer to the age-old question: who is
right? Was Harold right to express his annoyance with conduct he
perceived as racist and excessive, in coarse language? Was the police
officer right to arrest Harold in his perceived perception that Harold
was instigating a threat to the public peace? Was the security guard
right to expel the children from his shop and continue to press for
their departure from the vicinity? We don’t have enough facts, a lawyer
might argue. In a courtroom, various perspectives and motives would be
put in play, with neither party being satisfied by the result. Forensic
justice cannot answer competing claims for rightness in a manner
satisfying for everyone. But here, I stand with Harold.
We
react to moral decisions at a deeply emotional level. Goodness makes us
glad; we recoil from evil. Very early on, religious teachings
identified good and bad as beauty and ugliness, light and darkness.
‘Fairness’ has two meanings, one of which connotes beauty. Fairness as
a generalized principle of equity took some time to be formally
incorporated into the narrow arteries of justice, and in the minds of
many, they are—or should —be the same thing.
What stands in
the way of an ethical attitude is the lack of clarity about judgement
and the allocation of moral choices, which is to say, what we ought
to do in any given situation. Each of us is driven by what we feel to
be right, based on the way in which our life experience has conditioned
us to think. (I use the emotive word ‘feel’ here deliberately, for
moral choices are a complex of rational and emotional processes of
evaluation, with the emotions being dominant—after all, such choices go
to the very root of who we are as human personalities.) We are
introduced to a moral universe in which certain assumptions are
instilled into us before we achieve personhood. Some actions are bad
regardless of motivation. If a man abandons his family, it is a bad
thing. But a mature mind, a loving state of being, would seek the
circumstances: would mental illness in the offender make a difference?
Of course. An infantile sense of justice allocates blame in the result,
regardless of circumstances. Arrogance has a blinding potency.
Unfortunately, this leads in some cases to the lawyer’s ephemeral
answer to a request for an opinion: “It depends.” What I am trying to
get at here is the need for a discipline of discernment, the refinement
of our capacity to see what is essential in any set of circumstances,
and from the other’s point of view. Thinking critically is essential to
finding the true course. That doesn’t always come with age and
experience—but it usually does. Somewhere at the root of our humanity,
almost at a cellular level, there is a duty to share that wisdom.
I want to do the right thing
I have always wanted to do the right thing
but absolutes are for children
whose sense of justice is exaggerated
and the world is nicely managed
by simple allocations of good and bad
but the starting point for decisions
and in particular the nettlesome matter
of what to do about mistakes, or
that which readily inspires fear in us,
is not
reductio ad simpliciterbut a recognition of a moral stance
—one of empathy—which recognizes that
not everything is always as it seems
everything beyond that, the whole rich palette
of emphases, principles, values and possibilities
that could have been imagined in the love of you,
especially in its spiritual dimension,
can be grasped and explained only
as a consequence of this essential quality
I want to do the right thing. I do.
what that will be, in any given situation,
from now on until the end of days, will
try to comprehend the wonder that is you
© 2009 Stuart J. Whitley. All rights reserved.
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
age
candour
decision-making
ethical_attitude
experience
judgement
justice
moral_choice
respect
trust
wisdom
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.
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Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
Tagged with:
aboriginal
elder
ethic
justice
responsibility
wisdom
By Stu Whitley | Bio
This is the second post in a series. Read the first post.
I had my own struggle with depression, brought about by a confluence of
events that seemed overwhelming. In spite of my rational training and
experience as a lawyer, I was completely disabled by my loss of
perspective. I could not see beyond the shadows of perceived (and real)
threats. A feeling of being trapped is the best way to describe the
sense of hopelessness and abandonment I was experiencing.
Fear inspires the ‘fight or flight’ response, as we all know. But the
very preoccupation with survival paradoxically can immobilize us, in
the way that an eland, seized at the nose by a lioness, yields to a
dominant force. Depression is truly a form of pseudo-death—an
ambulatory sort of coma. In my experience, ameliorative drugs such as
Paxil and Prozac don’t do much more than maintain the most minimal of
functioning, at a cost of any exuberance, sexuality or joy.
[
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Written by eldering at Learning
Tagged with:
depression
justice
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