Newsletter #27

The Wisdom That Words Can’t Hold

Hi there,

Here’s a random question to ponder on a Saturday morning; do you prefer green grapes or black grapes?

I’m guessing you found an answer pretty quickly. Most people do (as long as they like grapes). There’s not much deliberation required. No need to write down a cost-benefit analysis. People just know.

But here's what's interesting about answering that question. The knowing that could articulate a preference didn't come from language. It came from somewhere else; the memory of the sweet taste of grapes on the tongue, the particular texture of the skin and the juicy flesh, the inner sensations registering in the body long before the brain reached for a word to describe it. The words “black”, “green”, “grape” and "prefer" are just symbolic noises we use to crudely express the experiences we’ve had in the past.

This may sound trivial but it’s pretty fundamental to the way we live our lives. Because appreciating and savouring experiences often gets lost in our obsession with thinking. And we do most of our thinking with words.

Most of us live, most of the time, in a world made of thoughts and words. It's understandable. Language is incredibly powerful. Categorisation allows communication. Rational analysis has built civilisations, cured diseases, sent people to the moon. I'm not dismissing any of that.

But we've made a subtle error as we’ve progressed along the road of sophisticated living. We've started to confuse the map for the territory. We've started to believe that if something can't be articulated, categorised, or quantified, it probably isn't real. Or at least isn't worth taking seriously.

Different Ways of Knowing

Jung identified four ways of knowing; thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Modern culture has elevated the first almost to the exclusion of the others. We talk about IQ. EQ gets a look in now and then. PQ and SQ (physical and spiritual intelligences) barely get a look in. And yet some of the most important things we know, we know through these neglected channels. The gut feeling that something is wrong before the evidence arrives. The aesthetic sense that a design is right. The bodily recognition that this relationship, this direction, this decision just feels right.

AI can process more words in a second than we can read in a lifetime. It can pattern-match, predict, and produce. But it cannot know what black grapes taste like. It cannot feel the connection to a piece of music. It processes the description of experience. It uses words and language in a very clever way. But it doesn't have access to experience itself. And that distinction matters. I think especially for leaders in business whose most important decisions often fall in the gap between what can be measured and what can be felt.

There's another problem with word-based thinking that's worth naming. It categorises things by dissecting them. It’s a trend that has taken its hold on modern society in general. Our reliance on modern science, brilliant as it is, tends toward reduction. Find the mechanism. Identify the atoms. Get underneath the bonnet. Understand the parts and you understand the whole.

But you cannot dissect what makes you feel alive.

You can map every neuron that fires during a moment of joy. You can measure cortisol and dopamine and heart rates. But none of these things, not one of them, captures the actual felt sense of being here, present, part of something unfolding. That aliveness doesn't live in the parts. It arises in the wholeness. It arises when you stop trying to understand life and simply let yourself be in it.

This is where wisdom lives that no amount of analysis can reach.

Feeling Whole

Wholeness isn't a concept. It's not a framework or a leadership model or a wellbeing initiative. Yes, it might be a word, but it’s trying (very clumsily) to describe the expansive and grounding feeling that arises when you stop thinking about your life through your experiences of the past with all its regrets and the future with its worries and untold analytical commentary. The wholeness of the universe isn't and can never divided into parts. Life doesn't wait for you to finish your to-do list before offering itself to you.

It's available right now. Not later, when things are clearer. Now.

So here's an invitation for today. It’s less a call to action and more a call to stillness. At some point today, put the words down. Let the sentences in your mind stop flowing through. Not forever. Just for a moment. Stop narrating. Stop categorising. Stop trying to figure it out.

Feel your feet on the ground. Notice the air. Sense the aliveness that's already moving through you. That aliveness, that sense of you and the universe and those birds and those trees being part of one big wholeness right now, was there before you had words for it. Before anyone had words for it. It’s always been there. Life as life. Felt here and now.

You don't need to understand it. You don’t need to describe it. You just need to let yourself feel it.

When you do, something shifts. A kind of recognition. Like arriving somewhere you didn't know you'd been missing. Held, not by anything you've achieved or understood but by the simple, irreducible fact that you're here.

You might think, ‘what’s the point of just standing there doing nothing?’

I’ll let you into a secret. That's not nothing. That's everything.

Until next time,

Simon