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 the pursuit of excellence and the secret undercurrents of desire that reveal the patterns of our lives.

Clearly defining ‘why’, and identifying priorities on that basis, is essential for happiness. This may be the only way that we can resist the pressure of leading ‘busy lives’, and replace intelligence with a to do list. I started the week blocked, aimless, burdened. Sunday morning I woke up before dawn, wandered from café to café doodling – and understood this one point: that over the past two years, I had been torn between activities  – Global Challenges, Marco Polo Project, my PhD, my writing, and many smaller projects and commitments which somehow made sense at the time. It is not, however, a simple matter of ‘choosing one’, but rather, to reflect on these dispersed activities and develop a deeper understanding of my own inner drives, look for the secret undercurrents shaping these various involvements. Then, led by a more conscious intuition of my deep inner motives – I can more surely say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whatever 2018 will bring.

After the French revolution, the burden of proof shifted, I read in Roger Scruton’s opus on Conservatism: the defenders of the statu quo should now justify ‘why preserve’, rather than revolutionaries arguing ‘why change’. This brought to mind some of the change makers, entrepreneurs and ‘people to watch’ I have come across in the past few years, proudly waving their impatience around and questioning the state of affairs. These people are dissatisfied with the state of the world – often rightly so. They call for change, therefore, proposing the big vision of a different world, asking their opponents, real or imaginary, how they can justify the status quo. But when it comes to the fine details of the big vision, and the long pathway towards implementing it – it’s not really their job to figure this out, they see themselves more as catalysts and big picture person – but surely somebody can. Or maybe things will simply sort themselves out once their efforts bear fruit, and their grand vision is adopted by all. These may not be the people I have most respect for.

Around a pot of dark beer, with a musician friend on Thursday, we came to speak about excellence, humility, and the character of Australia. The shortfall of this country may be laziness and complacency – but I have not seen it averse to the pursuit of excellence. Rather, it healthily reminds us all that our lives have many dimensions, and nobody should see themselves as more accomplished human beings only because they reached a certain level of competence or recognition in a given field of activity. This, in turn, breeds a certain balanced, original and optimistic creativity, a deep-rooted interest in the many facets of the human world, a superb sense of comedy, and a rare capacity for collective pursuits.