This year, I will reflect on the four cardinal virtues through daily practice and meditation, intentionally focusing on one per season. I started and finish 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, I reflected on prudence and priorities.

While practicing fortitude, I let most of my regular planning slip off – to simply focus on the present and exercise. On the first of returning to the practice of the virtue, I carried with me some of that wisdom, and deliberately restrained the range of my activities. I was in Adelaide for a conference. My default approach would be to move around the city through the day, looking for good food and memories. Instead, I limited the scope of my movements to a small set of streets in the East End, while working on a paper due the next day. I prioritised rest and work over exploration – and was immensely satisfied.

There is a lot of hype around the abundance mindset – if only we could think beyond scarcity, what would then be possible! Sure – but prudence also demands that we recognise where scarcity exists, and how we might best deal with it. In the opening speech of the LCNAU conference, a local MP came to speak and invited language teachers to do more this and more that – sure, but if we must do more of and more of, without ever doing less of – then we shall burn out, and give up. Instead, I anchored my talk in this idea: by understanding the new digital tools available for Chinese language education, could we figure out what we might be able to do less of?

Prudence combines active decision-making, and the subtle art of going with the flow. At the LCNAU conference, for two days, I followed natural affinities, spent fun times with people I got along with and had further chats with a few people I already knew, and might want to work with on existing projects. There were a number of experts in indigenous language education. I had been keen to meet some of them to discuss potential new projects – yet, on this occasion, didn’t. Was it a missed opportunity, something I should mourn over and resent myself for? Or should I rather think of it as a small step forward, and a wise way to approach each thing in its time?

I flew to the Philippines on Wednesday, 7h45 minutes on the plane. I normally would have fallen for the big Hollywood pictures, but noticed, increasingly, that they do not nurture me. Since I was heading to Manilla for a ‘mindful media’ program, I thought I should apply prudence to my choice of cinematic fiction on the plane. I read, and watched the two Chinese movies on offer instead of War for the Planet of the Apes – which triggering long, cathartic flows of tears, and had the added benefit of allowing me to practice my Mandarin.

There’s a thing I would like to call the ‘if only’ mindset: when a place or a person appeals to us – if only that one annoying characteristic could change. Manila, certainly, calls for this – if only the traffic was better. Maybe, but cities, and individuals, are systems of interconnected parts, and who knows if what people rave on about – the friendliness and resilience of the people – is not somehow connected to the crazy traffic. This is not to say that we should never aim for change, and accept everything as it is – but rather, that we should appreciate places (and people) as they are, in the moment, appreciate that the most irritating aspects could be directly connected to what we most love about them – and when we wish for change, be very very careful what we specifically wish for.

Friday was the beginning of the School of Slow Media Remix program – three days of Mindful media training. We finished the design of one activity the previous night at 11pm, some were not even entirely completed that night – and yet, it was a brilliant success, deeply transformative, and moving. I cried at times, while participants mapped out their ‘story universe’ on the floor of Pineapple Lab, and later, when Samuel presented the principles of Slow Media. Participants were moved as well, it seemed – and, as far as I could see, teams were bonding fast. Things do not need to be perfect in order to work – in fact, sometimes, cracks and imprecisions in the run sheet allow for on-the-moment creative insights, and make a facilitated program alive, and fertile. Consciously delaying completion goes against our perfectionism and anxiety, but may be the condition for truly great things to come to the world.