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

This week, the last of the year, I reflected on the relationship between past and future, and the respective roles of saying yes and saying no.

The time between Christmas and New Year is a time where – in Australia – everything closes, and the weekly rhythm is collectively suspended. There is a sense of abundance in this one week between the birth of Christ and the New Year. Time to rest, reflect, and prepare.

I woke up multiple times on the 25th, inspired by the spirit of the day – or maybe the spirits of the previous night. I headed over to the study, jotting down insights, then back to bed, and up again for more. Freedom and wealth are categorically distinct, as are freedom and power. Freedom in wealth and poverty differ, as do the freedom of the powerful and the freedom of the powerless – but wealth nor power are the form nor condition of our freedom. Their pursuit, therefore, should be subservient to the more fundamental pursuit of freedom – which I understand as the practice of virtue. For this, religion is a precious gift, which we celebrate on Christmas day. Religion is best understood not as a statement of belief, but as a language – an inherited structure that determines and enables our relationship to the world, each other, and our own self. In that perspective, different religions should be thought of not as logically distinct and mutually exclusive statements, but as different languages, each shaping the world in a unique manner. Therefore, there is no direct intelligibility between different religions. Rather, translation is required, possible – and, for those who put in the long hours required – immensely rewarding.

The best way to know what you want, and achieve proper discernment, is probably to look back, and consider what you’ve done. This proposal should be held along the one that liberation from the chains of our past is the path to contentment. This year in June, on the way to Europe, I took four days of stopover in Singapore to think about my 40s, and how I would like to live them. For this, I considered the goals I had given myself in 2017. For each in turn, I asked myself ‘why’ nine times over, digging deep in my intentions, until a pattern emerged. On Tuesday, I applied a similar approach to think through my goals for 2018. I reviewed my notebooks of the past 15 months, looking for goals I set myself, challenges I faced, and how I reflected on my past achievements. I realized, as I did so, that I made real progress on some fronts: recurring worries and challenges that I explored at length in the last months of 2016 and early 2017 have now disappeared. On other aspects, I was surprised how stuck I had been. After this exercise, I wrote new goals for the year to come, small and big. Develop a sustainable education and training portfolio. Deepen my spiritual practice. Read and listen to Chinese smoothly. Crystallize and share thoughts on knowledge and collective narratives as public goods. Finish my PhD. Review the ways I interact online. Pilot four new training programs. Develop four healthy habits. Block off six long week-ends with my partner. Do twelve adventurous things. These goals, I hope, are framed in a way that will allow me to break the circle, and go further up the spiral.

This year, I attempted to practice virtue. This was an exercise in saying yes. But as I repeatedly realized, for this, I often had to say no. However, it is only by the end of December that I started thinking about sin, and the role of that concept. Proper understanding of sin is a crucial part of prudence: by helping us identify what we should avoid, it also limits the field of possibilities, thereby making it simpler to distinguish the right choice. Sin is a drive we should resist – but it comes in many forms, and often confuses us. What appears as resisting lust or gluttony may, in fact, be following the path of pride or sloth. Sometimes we feel that an action was wrong, but we’re unsure exactly why: this, again, shows an inadequate understanding of sin.

One particularly dangerous form of sin, I realized on Thursday, is the pride that we take in our own achievements, and our gluttony for getting things done – best manifested by the terrible adjective ‘busy’. I didn’t take time to reflect on prudence that day, but simply jotted down those thoughts before heading to bed – with a belief that this was, in fact, acting with prudence.

Friday, this year-long project finished. I dedicated four sets of thirteen weeks to the deliberate practice of the four cardinal virtues. The end of a commitment often comes with a sense of relief – as if a burden was lifted from one’s shoulder. In this case, however, the feeling is different. The result of this project is not only the fifty blog posts I produced. I changed.

I will not repeat the project next year, nor engage in one exactly similar. I will continue writing regularly – but on a broader range of topics. And I will continue to practice virtue, but no longer write about it systematically.

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.

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 rest-after-the-fact, and how to deal with the confusion of things ending.

It is prudence to prepare early, but sometimes, schedules are not optimate, and things have to be done at the last minute. When that is the case, as it was for me this week on Monday, it is prudence – maybe – to take time off after the fact. But how should one approach that period of time after things are completed, yet before a new cycle starts?

This is how I found myself on Tuesday, the year not ended yet, but all my goals for 2017 either completed, or deliberately postponed. Leaving days to pure chance, vacant, seemed unwise – but for some reason, I recoiled at calling the three weeks to the end of the year ‘holidays’. Instead, I listed a few things to do by December 31: see friends, plan for 2018, clear my folders and notes, and – whatever that means – progress on my PhD.

Wednesday was another day off – I had booked a massage and flotation tank experience from a Facebook ad over two months ago, and headed off to Heidelberg West – of all places – where the clinic was located. I left early, coffee’d on the mall, floated, got a massage, then ate a delicious falafel at Kebabs on Bell, hiding in the aircon from the 36+ degree day. The trip, though seemingly absurd, was a fun adventure, where I discovered a new part of Melbourne, new stories, new people – and I found this a good way to rest.

There is prudence in saying this is too much, and even if I disappoint, I will not deliver the goods. I was reminded of this over the end of the week, as I saw myself failing to ‘get things done’, on Thursday, then on Friday. Instead, I hovered rather aimlessly, till, Friday 6pm, I gave in, sat in the Henley Club armchair with a glass of wine, and finished off the week with friends.

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 action.

“I learned three things about happiness during this program,” I shared in the closing circle of the three-day Manila Remix program I co-facilitated with the School of Slow Media, on Sunday evening. “First, that happiness often comes not from calculation, but irrational decisions – as, for me, the decision to fly twice to the Philippines, and be here with you. Second, that happiness is not something that we consume, like a magic pill, but something that emerges as a result of our own activity. And – consequently – I learned, also, that happiness can often manifest even as we feel completely depleted of energy, when we finished a cycle of action, and all we need is rest.”

We develop routines and ways of living that balance the various elements of our life. When we travel to new places, often, one element can be disrupted, and we topple. With my French and Italian background, good food has been a staple in my life, and – as I articulated over lunch on Monday – served as a repeated source of pleasure balancing off the many small frustrations of everyday life. The food in Manila did not suit my palate – and by Monday, I felt a growing sense of lack. Luckily that day, lunch at the Brave Design house had fresh basil from the garden in abundance – and as I chewed eagerly, I could feel myself getting back into shape.

It is important to take time off, but to do so, we must leave aside things that have to be done. There is no end to the work of cleaning and caring and organising. Therefore, time off happens only when we choose to neglect something that calls for us. This is the wisdom embedded in the Gospel scene of Mary and Martha. Yes, it is important to fuss over the kitchen and give guests a good meal – but there will be always be more to be done, and the moment will never repeat. Therefore, wisdom demands that, sometimes, we push our work aside, and take time to sit with the visitor – or with ourselves – trusting that those around us can bear with a bit of chaos, so that we be more present.

There is no centre to Manila, nor is there a clear cultural narrative of what it means to be Filipino. The people I met are open-minded, original, warm, and diverse. Life here seems to follow an ever-repeated quest for meaning, integrating the various elements that come from outside, rather than the deliberate unfolding of a predetermined existential script. This is a trading seaport – a place of creative chaos – an open structure.

Developed infrastructure reduces the need for individual prudence. Everything works as expected, and, in some aspect, this increases the range of our potential action: reliable infrastructure is a valuable public good, if we prioritise productivity. In Manila, the wrong choice of work, commitment, timing, location, can result in hours blocked in traffic. Apps and collective wisdom reduce uncertainty, but only to a degree. What’s more, in this polycentric city, there is no clear intrinsically better place to be. Prudence is therefore not only required, but cultivated – together with a different attitude – patience, and a cheerful embrace of the creative possibilities inherent in chaos.

I landed back in Melbourne on Friday, after a short and fitful night on the plane. I had discounted that entire day, projecting myself into zombie state, comatose in my armchair – but I was surprisingly with it, I finished a book, I cleared a backlog of admin work, and I chatted with friends. We can often do more than we believe – whether it’s embracing activity, or deliberately resting and reflecting – as long as we choose to resist the siren call of emptiness. And this will bring us joy.