Retrospective (Post)

How to Distill Wisdom from Experience: Living an Examined Life.

Inset: ‘Threshold by Eduardo Calzado

If you want just the Daily Practice, not the whole post, there is a version of the essential part, read in my own voice HERE.

The Power of an Examined Life.

It was arguably the most iconic Greek philosopher, Socrates, who said:

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

The problem is you never got told exactly what to examine, or how. And here you are again, feeling the same feelings, stuck in the same patterns and wondering what you did wrong.

It helps to think of your life in packets. There was the packet you spent in the womb. There was the packet of your infancy, then the toddler packet, and so on. In a way, this last cycle you have been through was a packet. And if you are open to the idea of renewal, it means you will be getting ready to pick yourself up and face a new cycle, a new packet.

Within a day, this might be our meal times, our daily commute, our conversations and our meetings. To live an examined life, then, implies that you have to ‘look back’, and examine the packets of your life, or your day.

Sleep is the little death, they say, and the Irish tell us that “Death is the middle of a long life.”

How far back you reflect—when sitting with this practice—is up to you. Your heart will tell you what magnitude of death and rebirth you are facing right now.

How much more meaning and insight would we glean from such an exercise than the usual rinse-repeat of getting to the end of a year, struggling under a mountain of regret and then making pithy New Years Resolutions to hang like a sword over our own future head?

How many times have we already done this? How badly do we set ourselves up for guilt and shame when we inevitably fail?

For a daily practice, this obviously frames a reflection on the day that is coming to a close. Wonderfully, however, this practice applies more profoundly when we look back once or twice at whole era of our lives that are coming to a close—in our very private internal life, our relationships and our work.

You have come all this way. You have lived another day. And maybe the same old pattern came for you again today. The old anxieties, moments of anger, time when you should have ‘this’ or ought to have ‘that’. The same stuckness and inertia. The same old scripts that play like background noise, convincing you that nothing will change.

But if you are here now, still breathing, still able to read these words, then you are standing in front of a choice that still belongs to you.

What got you here, will not get you there.

The road you followed brought you here, but it will also keep drawing you back.

Now, you have come all this way—for what? To be drawn down into the small, close trap of your own cycles of rumination and regret?

Unless…

A better way—you face the whole of it, the good, the bad and the unconscious—you examine the whole of it and ask yourself, “If I had my time again…”

“If I had my time again, how would I choose differently?”

This question, is how wisdom is distilled from experience. Mistakes are how we learn, and this practice is the master class to making good whisky from the sour mash of a trying day.

There are two such magic questions. Life keeps presenting us with moments that secretly define us. If you have a human heart, if you care for things, you will be torn between giving enough and having enough to give, caught between opposing impulses toward harmony or defiance, both of which take different forms of courage. We are often left wondering exactly when to ‘Be’ and when to ‘Become’.

Haven’t you been caught here yourself, between the advice to simply be yourself, and the advice goading you to grow, to become?

The secret aim of all tension is transformation.

Don’t you recognise this tension—the one that speaks in your one ear saying, how peace is only here, in the now, and then, the opposite voice, whispering about something over the horizon that beckons to you, something beyond, that nevertheless feels, like home?

Life really happens most essentially in these moments that force our choice, and even avoidance or looking away, even remaining silent and abstaining from an outward choice, is still a choice.

Before we surrender to the choice, or default into one made for us by our lack of sovereignty and conscious leadership, we can grant ourselves the opportunity to ask the first golden question:

“What does love look like right now?”

In other words, “What can I do, how can I show up in this impossible moment, that makes it possible, for that which I find most beautiful and meaningful in the world, to be realised?”

There are no right or only answers at such times. We can only follow our hearts.

We can only follow our hearts.

Sometimes the answer is to speak up, sometimes it is to be silent. Sometimes it is to give, sometimes to take away, sometimes it is to hold a wing out for someone to find sanctuary under, and sometimes it is the holding of a boundary. This is really the only way to avoid avoidable regret, to make our choices from love.

But the busyness and the rigours of daily life constantly conspire against us—to stimulate our anxieties and to agitate our nervous systems helplessly into numbness and distraction. And so, we cannot be conscious in every moment. We cannot be perfect.

This is where the second golden question left to us becomes most relevant. It begins with the words: “If I had my time again…”

The business world, specifically the practice of Agile, taught us a convention whereby we acknowledge that there can only ever be limited utility to cycles of post-hoc analysis and rumination. If we get to a moment at the end of a cycle where we cannot claw back victories from the closed chapter of the period behind us, all we can ask, again, is “What does love look like right now?”

And if Love does not look like leadership, how can it be real love? And leadership, is always, always, more concerned about distilling meaning and wisdom from experience, than piling on blame or burning further energy and attention on rumination and regret.

That does not mean we don’t get to grieve what is worth grieving. In every cycle and season of our lives we should make time for grieving. If you have nothing to grieve, grieve that you have nothing to grieve, because it means simply that you have not yet lived.

This is how I sit with this question that arrives at the end of each day..

A RETROSPECTIVE
—the bedtime prayer

Another cycle all but done.
Nothing more to plant this turn, 
nothing more to sow, 
nothing more to harvest, 
nothing more to grow.

Time to let the world lie fallow.
A necessary reprieve now
from the anxious tinkering 
and fretting 
of trying to become.

A surrender to the chrysalis of sleep, 
of winter and death, 
the in between, 
where everything in the world 
closes its eyes and comes to rest, 
before some new shape 
of mind and meaning can emerge.

Let my embrace of that surrender 
be the final invitation that leads me 
toward that threshold
—a real question, 
not a riddle:

“Looking back
at the cycle that has been,
If I had my time again—
 what would I stop,
 what would I start
 and what would I keep?”

So that,
my heart may have the final say
on how I balanced the books 
of meaning and regret.

So that I can grieve what was lost,
celebrate what was good,
honour the turn for what it was, 
forgive what I need to forgive
and allow it to be both 
part of me and  behind me.

So that I can release the anchor 
of that ship and that journey, 
and that storm that carried me here.

So that,
I can notice a new star 
to follow in the sky,
raise a new sail,
and thereby signal to Life
my intention to learn 
my willingness to change
and my readiness to grow,
and my renewed devotion 
to The Great So That,
which always was
the only form of acceptance 
of the great 
and perennial 
invitation.

—Rocco Jarman

This piece is not just a poem—it is a casting vote, for the better, future, you. It is a prayer to your own Legacy, of everything you care about in this life and beyond. And you need nothing by way of naive faith to practice this, only an authentic appreciation for the meaning of your own life and the brief time we get upon this earth.

For everything we care about most, there will be a last time. From picking our children up, eating at our favourite places, or spending time with friends and loved ones, a day will come when that door closes.

There was a ‘last time’ you kissed a lover.

There was a ‘last time’ you went to play outside with your friends.

There was a ‘last time’ you knew what innocence meant by not yet knowing anything at all.

How present we can be really is what allows us to make the most of our lives. Presence is what deepens our connection to life, and connection is what deepens meaning.

Today your consciousness can still burn bright, and your body is still capable of so much. So much is still possible.

You are so incredibly empowered right now.

This piece has been a meaningful companion for me on my own journey, and I wish no less than the same quality of companionship and guidance for you.

Rocco.

Remember, just like the words of this prayer, even our dearest practices and habits are things we need to set down at times. Repitition without break increases familiarity and familiarity compromises our capacity for presence, discernment and intentionality. This is why we practice fasting.

There is great wisdom in breaking your life into packets, cycles and seasons. This is what gives us the opportunity to distil wisdom from experience, to learn from our mistakes and to transform our lives into journeys of navigation.

If you want to learn how to craft such a discerning practice, how to integrate it skilfully into your life, join our A Better Way community. I am the founder, and I will be leading the conversation and the practice.

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