School of Life

Actionable Insights

• Check out
  • Michel de Montaigne's Essays
  • Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Ponder

Highlights

Introduction

Education

We are not individually much cleverer than the average animal, a heron or a mole, but knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.

Our energies are overwhelmingly direct towards material, scientific and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their marriage or kindness, relatively few hours are spent learning about how to deal with emotions.

We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds, a move striking as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.

Romanticism has been deeply committed to casting doubt on the need to apply reason to emotional life, preferring to let spontaneous feeling play an unhampered role instead.

We have the technology of an advanced civilization balancing precariously on an emotional base that has not developed much since we dwelt in caves.

Emotional Intelligence

Intelligence is a catch-all-word for what is in fact a range of skills directed at a number of different challenges.

What is certain is that there is no such thing as an intelligent person per se and probably no entirely dumb one either.

When we speak of emotional intelligence, we are referring to their ability to introspect and communicate, to read the moods of others, to relate with patience, charity and imagination to the less edifying moments of those around them.

The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding and selective resignation.

The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world.

And knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.

The culture that might replace scripture remains a theoretically intriguing and emotionally deeply compelling concept. And yet it has, to all intents and purposes, been entirely ignored. Culture has not in any way replaced scripture.

The intensity of need and the emotional craving that religions once willingly engaged with have not been thought acceptable within the contemporary cultural realm.

Self-Help

In reality, there could be few more serious tasks for any literary work than guiding and consoling us and weakening the hold that confusion and error have on us.

Self-Development

Once we're past eighteen or so, our progress is still monitored but it is envisaged in different terms: it is cast in the language of material and professional advancement. But emotional growth still continues.

These quiet but very real milestones don't get marked. We're not given a cake or a present to mark the moment of growth. We're not congratulated by other of viewed with enhanced respect.

Akrasia

The contemporary education system proceeds under two assumptions about how we learn.

• It believes that how we are taught matters far less than what we are taught.
• The education system assumes that once we understand something, it will stick in our minds for as long as we need it to.

But an emotional education may require us to adopt two different starting points. For a start, how we are taught may matter inordinately, because we have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves.

We may prefer to do almost anything other than take in information that could save us.

Moreover, we forget almost everything. Our memories are sieves, not robust buckets. What seemed a convincing call to action at 8 a.m. will be nothing more than a dim recollection by midday and an indecipherable contrail in our cloudy minds by evening.

Our enthusiasms and resolutions can be counted upon to fade like the stars at dawn.

Ancient Greece philosophers, described the structural deficiencies of our minds with a special term. They proposed that we suffer from Akrasia, commonly translated as weakness of will.

A habit of not listening to what we accept should be heard and a failure to act upon what we know is right.

It is because of Akrasia that we often both understand what we should do and resolutely omit to do it.

There are two solutions to this fragilites of mind: Art and Ritual.