Year of Discovery (Week 7: Intellectualizing vs Internalizing, Nature)
This was a big moving and shifting week for me. I came back to Kenya from South Africa on Monday after a deeply meaningful 6 weeks. My time there felt both fast and slow, where I oscillated between feelings of anxiety and times of peace and ease. I had numerous conversations with people that left me in complete awe — from meeting the leadership at Generation Schools (one of the best education models I’ve seen) to learning about the opportunities and challenges in building companies in South Africa from the perspective of ecosystem builders, investors, ex-bank CEOs and entrepreneurs. I appreciated every person’s openness and honesty and it left me feeling grateful for the people doing the hard work to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems. In South Africa, I also explored my identity as a hyphenated Taiwanese, deepened my spiritual practice in a way I wasn’t expecting to, and connected with old and new friends. I also found new terms that I like similar to ‘Year of Discovery’: soul-batical, soul mission finding — that move away from the archaic ‘sabbatical’ term which makes me think of academic leave or partial retirement. All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better launch to my Year of Discovery.
This week, I’ve moved into a new house in Nairobi (after having given up my lease previously when I thought I was moving to Mozambique) and I’m excited about what this new change of scenary will entail.
Intellectualizing versus Internalizing
Last week, I had an energizing monthly writing check-in with a friend. She shared that the pieces I write for the YoD are more powerful when I push myself into the questions and share my reflections on them, instead of holding the questions at arm’s length. It made me think more about the Buddhist teachings and talks I’ve been attending and how the Buddhist monks share the distinction between intellectualizing versus internalizing Buddha’s teachings:
- Intellectualizing = where we observe things from the outside and pick them apart like a professor in Buddhism. This is when we give advice instead of live by the advice.
- Internalizing = where there is alignment between our words, actions, and thoughts because we deeply know the wisdom to be true as we realize them in our lived experience. This is when we live the advice we give.
Intellectualizing is always easier than internalizing because the former doesn’t force us to grapple with ourselves and our identity and be open to the possibility of change. Moving forward in these posts, I’m going to try my best to pull the questions closer to me. Even if I ask fewer questions, I’ll take a stab at them, instead of throwing them all to the reader to ponder. I’ll do the work:
- What is the difference between internalizing vs intellectualizing in my life?
- What am I intellectualizing that I want to truly internalize? How do I get there?
Thinking about this tension between internalizing and intellectualizing makes me reflect on the number of things I espouse but struggle to make a reality in my day-to-day. I can intellectualize why it’s important to be healthy, why anger and jealousy are coming from my mind and creating suffering within and around me, why money is a tool and not the goal, etc. But until I meditate and train my mind to question deeply to understand the truth, I won’t be able to create real, sustainable shifts in my habits, beliefs and behavior in order to lessen suffering. In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about identity-based habits. To build a new identity is to build a new belief system and it’s significantly harder to do that than trying out new habits or simply saying, “I want to lose weight”. Instead, shifting habits by first addressing identity illustrates the wisdom that unless we deeply internalize who we want to become first (how we think, what we believe) then we may possibly be stuck in an endless loop of hoping to become someone that we aren’t.
But as with any habit, it takes time to build. A big learning I had this week is that delusions like anger and jealousy are habits of the mind and not the intrinsic nature of the mind. As humans, we have less familiarity with a pure, happy mind (from these delusions) and the practice of meditation and learning the Buddhist doctrine for me has been about improving the familiarity with a pure mind and over time, creating that as my default state of mind. Just like how I can build a practice of exercising 4–5x a week, I’m learning that I can also build a habit or practice of deepening my spiritual practice and internalizing wisdom, instead of acknowledging it externally.
- What do I want to internalize now and then build a habit around?
Perspectives of Nature
A big part of my time in South Africa included walks by the sea and hikes through the mountains. In many ways, I love being reminded of the magnitude of nature and the smallness of humans. Every time I look at the waves crashing or rocks slipping down a mountain, I realize how little control I really have and that the world is truly greater outside of me and my mind. I realize how much creation is happening all around and how the walls I put up in my home or in my heart are all a facade of control, because end of the day, randomness is all around and all I can control is my mind and how I react vs what happens outside of me.
Nature also reminds me of the real solitude of the human experience. No one will ever truly understand the experiences inside another person and yet, there is universal wisdom we can all learn from and that we can draw empathy and compassion for one another. In the stillness of nature without the noise and urgency of day-to-day life, I often find that I’m able to meditate or discover inner wisdom by observing the changing yet still nature of the trees, the birds and the clouds.
“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Questions to reflect on:
- What learnings can we acquire from being in nature?
- What is the role of solitude in any person’s life and in their growth?
- In what ways can I incorporate an intentionality on my relationship with nature?
My aim is that no matter where I go, I find ways and environments to regularly connect with nature. Like a morning cup of coffee everyday, I want to build a more consistent connection with nature around me continuously so I continue to be grounded and humbled by the true resilience and power of the natural world and gain perspective on the real scale of my challenges.
What I’m watching: Polyplexus: What is a Conjecture MicroPub?
