The Waft

Not dramatic revelations. Nothing that requires me to disappear into the mountains and return wearing sandals.

They are subtler than that. More like a small waft of wind carrying a scent I have never quite smelt before, but pleasant enough to make me stop and wonder where it came from.

Most of my thinking is not like this.

Most of it is scaffolding. Block building. Clanging pieces together and searching my internal database for what something could possibly mean. But every now and then, something arrives already formed. A small pathway opens that did not appear to be there before.

I have been circling the same question for a week now, dressed in different clothes each time.

Where does real insight actually come from?

It began with a conversation about how everyone sees the world through their own reality.

The world is real. Other people are real. But each of us reads that shared world through our own filter of memory, culture, temperament and mood.

I came across a couple of terms in psychology that seem to describe some of this. Constructivism and schema theory.

As I understand them, the general idea is that we don’t just absorb the world as it is. We make sense of it using what we’ve already experienced, building up little mental frameworks along the way. When something new comes along, we try to fit it into what we already know, and sometimes we have to change what we thought we knew.

That makes sense to me.

It is a good framework.

But something in me resisted treating it as bedrock.

Not because it is wrong. Because even a framework that explains a great deal can become misleading when we begin pretending it explains everything.

I wonder if this is what happens when we become too attached to an explanation. Once it accounts for enough of what we see, perhaps we stop looking quite so closely at the things it doesn’t explain.

And when careers, departments and entire industries have been built around an idea, I imagine it becomes considerably harder to question it without upsetting a few people.

Siblings make an interesting test case.

Two people can grow up in the same house, with the same parents and many of the same defining events, yet emerge with remarkably different personalities and ways of seeing the world.

Of course, they did not experience the house identically. They arrived with different temperaments. They occupied different positions in the family. The same event may have landed differently in each of them.

That does not destroy the framework.

It simply reminds us that the framework is not the person.

You see something similar in psychotherapy. Two practitioners can receive the same training, study the same textbooks and complete the same supervised hours, yet produce very different results for the people sitting across from them.

The method matters.

So does the person applying it.

Judgment matters. Character matters. Intuition matters. The ability to see the person in front of you rather than merely locating them inside a theory matters.

I also wonder how often a practitioner brings their own unresolved issues into the room. Perhaps they become particularly attached to the part of a framework that makes sense of their own experience, and before long begin seeing it in everyone else.

Sometimes, I suspect, what looks like professional insight may simply be their own unresolved stuff wearing a nice suit and carrying a diploma.

This is where the older Māori way of understanding a person offers something genuinely different.

A tohunga was not operating without a framework. Quite the opposite. The framework was wider.

tohunga noun. A learned expert or specialist; in this context, a practitioner skilled in traditional Māori healing and spiritual knowledge.

A person could not be separated cleanly from their whakapapa, whenua, whānau, body, spirit, temperament or place within the community. Healing involved more than isolating a symptom and matching it to a category. The person existed within a web, and the web mattered.

whakapapa noun. Genealogy and lineage; the layered relationships connecting a person to ancestors, family, community and place.

whenua noun. Land, country or homeland. The word also means placenta, expressing the relationship between people, birth and the land.

whānau noun. Family or extended family group; the immediate network of relationships within which a person belongs.

The strength of that understanding depended on the web remaining intact.

Colonisation did not merely challenge particular beliefs. It disrupted the conditions through which knowledge was developed, tested and passed on. Land relationships changed. Communities were displaced. New diseases, foods, substances and social conditions entered the picture. Whare wānanga closed, knowledge transmission weakened and practices that had existed within a coherent cultural world were pushed underground.

whare wānanga noun. A traditional house of higher learning where specialised knowledge, history, genealogy and spiritual practices were taught and preserved.

The old knowledge was not necessarily wrong.

But the world around it had been rearranged, and the people carrying it were being asked to solve an equation while somebody was still adding variables.

That is one thread.

The personal one seems unrelated, but I suspect it is the same thread wearing different clothes.

Since treating my sleep apnea with CPAP, I have felt clearer. Not transformed into a genius, regrettably, but more mentally present. There seems to be more room between thoughts and a greater chance of noticing something subtle before the usual machinery clatters over the top of it.

I do not know exactly what is recovering, reorganising or simply functioning properly after years of disrupted sleep. I am trying not to construct an entire neurological theory from the pleasant experience of waking up with my brain switched on.

I have also spent the last week brushing my teeth with my non-dominant hand.

This may have nothing whatsoever to do with anything.

It is awkward. Some mornings it is annoying. It requires concentration at precisely the time I would prefer to be brushing on autopilot while thinking about what comes next.

But perhaps the interruption is the useful part.

The brain cannot coast through the movement in the usual way. It has to pay attention. A simple automatic act becomes briefly unfamiliar again.

Resistance training may contribute to the same general pile. Not because lifting weights secretly makes one a philosopher, although many men with podcasts appear convinced that it does. But the body and brain are not separate departments. Sleep, physical effort, recovery, novelty and attention all change the conditions in which thought occurs.

Perhaps insight is neither entirely built nor simply received.

The scaffolding matters. Everything we have read, experienced, argued with, rejected and half-remembered supplies the material. But occasionally the mind needs enough rest, quiet or friction against the automatic for those pieces to arrange themselves in a way we did not consciously command.

The thought feels as though it arrived from somewhere else.

Perhaps it had simply been forming somewhere beneath the noise.

I wonder if children experience something like this more often. So much of the world is still unfamiliar to them. Their expectations are constantly being interrupted.

For the rest of us, life becomes increasingly automated. We know how the toothbrush works. We know what the drive to work looks like. We know what we think about most things before they have finished happening.

Novelty no longer arrives uninvited.

Perhaps we have to leave a window open for it.

So when a new thought does arrive, I am trying not to seize it immediately, name it, defend it and build a department around it.

For now, I am content to notice that the air moved.