Thinking about this stanza from a T.S. Eliot poem:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot, No. 4 of Four Quartets, 1943
Everything around us can change radically as we venture out to see what is out there and find what we need. The great ending of a journey of exploration is the changing of perspective. When we see differently and know the world and ourselves better, we see new details, new connections, new value in things we had seen over and over again, even overlooked.
How can we change so much during these journeys?
Adam Mastroianni likens our systems of beliefs to a fiefdom, where they become increasingly defended and innassailable as we approach the fortress that keeps our most cherished ones. To break into the fortress and upgrade these beliefs that can become outdated we cannot just tell ourselves to do it. A change in fundamental beliefs to a state of wisdom happens slowly and painstakingly, chipping away at it slowly and with lived experience. The transformation in our environment and the loss of our departure place that a long journey entails are a way to induce truly integrated knowledge in our perception of the world.
What else can provoke this change?
The old adage that says “It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.” can be applied here. Exploration does not need to be a literal journey to the other side of the world. It needs to be a form of action that is consistent and defies the established routines and dissatisfactions of your environment. In both cases, be it internal or external exploration, the empirical feedback that we generate while we test our beliefs can do wonders in refreshing those that went untested for too long, in reinforcing those that prove themselves adequate and in discovering new ones. We return from our exploration with a renewed set of beliefs, a new way of knowing what surrounds us.
What are some other obstacles that keep us from updating our perspective while staying in the same place?
Uncharted whispers, intriguing backlogs, experiments on something we’ve never done but always remain somewhere in the back of our heads. That kind of itch that we need to test even if we fail or find out we don’t like it. If it’s not done, it will keep haunting us. They are like gatekeepers of mind spaces that we need to gain access to in order to go forward in life. These mind spaces might be in need of a declutter or might hold invaluable ideas not too related to our uncharted whispers but eclipsed by them. The gate must be opened somehow, and one way is in exploring them just to chart them and see whether they mean something to us or it was all in our heads.
Not only change, but also developing taste:
Paul Graham in his essay “How to do great work” says that taste must be cultivated to do great work. He defines taste as knowing what is out there in the relevant field of your work and learn to understand which of these are the best and why. In the context of this exploration, we can finish by arriving where we started with a cultivated taste that allows us to see great things in it that were invisible to our previously undiscerning eye. We learn to appreciate details on our own terms and find meaningful value in them.
And what better way to learn to appreciate the place where we started, the departure point from which everything else emerged, than in learning to see its beauty, the beauty that goes unnoticed, and learning to help others see it as well.
In the end, we can arrive to the place that we started and know it for the first time, with renewed fundamental beliefs, with new ways of thinking obtained by testing ideas in the real world, with a decluttered mind at peace with its deep set wonderings about untried desires, with a cultivated taste in noticing greatness in things that we could not see before. And ultimately an appreciative eye into seeing and showing all the beauty there is in it to others, using your refreshened perspective to help them see it as well.
But we do not need to dwell in it for too long. Coming back and knowing for the first time is enough of a reward. We can always find other new paths to explore and new starting points and experience the delight of this process all over again.
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