This year, I will reflect on the four cardinal virtues through daily practice and meditation, intentionally focusing on one per season. I started the year with prudence – or the rational capacity to distinguish good from evil. Every week, I will publish an update on this blog, in the form of a free-flowing meditation.

This week is the last of my first engagement with prudence. To bring together these first two months, I focused on the relationship between duration and insight.

Prudence is deliberation, judgement, and resolution to act. Deliberation takes time, but results in a set of options for future action, a decision branch, and a capacity to choose among various paths. Something very particular occurs then: we leave the realm of pure duration, where cause follows consequence, to touch what the Greeks would call Kairos, crucial instants of opportunity. The fruit of prudence is therefore nothing else than freedom, escape from the plane of determinism through regular encounter with pure instants of self-determination.

Prudence entails creativity – which I understood in a new manner on Monday. I was invited to contribute ideas on a web-forum for a foreign policy White Paper discussion. In the shower, I had an insight: decentralise decision-making. It is not a radically new proposal, but not one I had seen in this context. The hot water allowed me to loosen the attachment between an idea and its usual domain of application. This is how creativity operates, by simple transfer. Yet I was not able to share the idea in a convincing manner. I had an intuition that there was something there, but lacked the form to give it full meaning in the context of reception. And so, the proposal fell flat.

On Tuesday, I reflected further on the connection between my work and prudence. I am finalising a report for the Foundation that I work for. My role as editor-in-chief requires me to sharpen the texts I receive and clarify the logic of their argument. Beyond this, I must also write short prefaces. Many readers will only skim through the full version, their expectations largely framed by these short introductory texts. As their eyes glance over the pieces proper, they will seek keywords and ideas based on the few words in italics at the beginning.I wondered, if a 1000-word text can be summarised in 75 words, why bother with the long form? But without the text in full, prefaces would have no value. We may only care about the core insight – but will not accept it unless we have proof that it was formed over time, and requires a measure of time to be fully grasped. We want, in idea at least, the possibility to reproduce the slower pace of deliberation before we resolve.

The last two weeks have been exhausting. This week I had to shift gears. It is not something I am very good at. When I woke up on Wednesday, I realised I would probably not be able to do much in the morning – I was invited to a whole afternoon and evening function already. I remembered precious wisdom from my father. A friend of his had an unusual piece of real estate to sell, a cellar in a middle suburb of Paris, and didn’t know what to do with it. My father’s tip for creativity was: what if you were to give it away, who would most benefit from it? Ideas started to flow. Since I was not going to do anything productive, what if I thought of that morning as a gift to myself? What would I choose to do with it? The weather was warm, I sat at Riverland Café by the Yarra, with no particular goal in mind, simply looking over the river at palm trees, watching a man hose down his boat, and rowers pass by. I opened a notebook, and found myself reflecting on personal strategy, then articulating the next steps of my various projects. I made a short action list of immediate to do’s. Then left for another café, refreshed, inspired, and ready to restart.

A few weeks ago, I classified the various types of activities that I do for work. One set of those I labelled ‘cleaning’: ordering folders, clearing my inbox, stretching my limbs. Thursday was a cleaning day. Simple oversight: I had two weeks under high pressure and deprioritised anything that could be postponed. As a result, I had a backlog to clean, and it was clogging my brain. It took me three days to catch up, and return to order. I realised once again that insights and ideas can occur in a flash, but only when the right structures are in place. Often, we focus on the wrong thing: it’s not that we need to push and strive for new projects and initiatives, they come fast. But for that, we need to keep the channels clean – and this requires more time than we’re generally willing to allocate.

There had been two strands over the week – insights and duration; doing and ordering. They came together on Friday, when I realised that the insights we have are a direct factor of the type of order we make around us. Out physical position will determine perspectives – alignments reveal symmetries, shadows hide or highlight key features. To the same extent, the way we choose to think of the world around us will reveal parallels and differences. Prudence, through deliberation, generates options, and reveals our own freedom. This freedom depends on our capacity to categorise adequately. Efforts we make to see the world in a more complex fashion, integrate new perspectives, consider different potential groupings, will then directly result in greater degrees of freedom.