To all you friends who visit, contribute or merely read the posts on this Quora Space, I wish a Happy New Year. For many of us 2020 has been a challenging time. Some of us have lost loved ones to Covid-19, and others have suffered severe economic hardship. While our discussions on this site usually focus on rational thinking (what Kahneman calls “system 2,”) there is also a need to engage on a regular basis in reflection, involving both rational and visceral thinking. The end of a year, is an ideal time to imbibe in such meditations while sitting with a glass of wine, whiskey, or tea and listening to your favourite type of reflective music.
Charles Darwin, who spent most of his life analyzing information and looking for patterns in data, in a brief autobiography written for his children, emphasized the importance of taking time to live in the moment. Biodiversity Heritage Library (Vol. 1, page 81).
I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure…But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry…My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts…
And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Indeed, true wisdom grows out of regular periods of reflection stimulated by reverie, poetry, music, literature, and intellectual activity that invokes a substantial component of visceral experience. To those who have suffered significantly in 2020, I am reproducing a small sliver of Kipling’s poem If, that you probably read in high school.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Kipling purportedly addressed this poem to his only son, John, in 1908. John was killed in action 7 years later in 1915 at the age of 18 during the Battle of Loos in World War I. Suffering is the price we pay for living, breathing, and consciousness, but it can also contribute to a higher level of self-awareness and wisdom, if ameliorated with reflection. A reflective habit of mind is the gift that keeps on giving.
I wish you, my friends, a joyful and reflective year in 2021 and beyond.
Brendan Kelly
