Written by Nathan Vanderpool
Wisdom: A process of deepening alignment among 👁️ View, ❤️ Care, and 🤲 Action.
<aside> ❤️ Care: What do I sense to be good, true, and beautiful? (A process of attunement)
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The previous page outlined how 👁️ View models reality, directing Attention and generating Insight. But your process of updating models is not based on cold calculation. ❤️ Care directs your attention toward an embodied sense of meaning—including what people and things mean to you, and what you mean to other people and the world. Your attention, however, can also steer you toward things that undermine your sense of meaning. Two features of Care help outline this process: Values and Distortions.
Meet 👨🏾🦱 Agape (pronounced ah-GAH-pay, he often cheerfully explains). Agape is very active in his community. Walking in the park, he runs into a friend. The friend begins talking about a new garden being built down the street. Agape becomes frustrated as his friend starts to ramble and dominate the discussion. Noticing this, the friend apologizes for talking so much. Agape suddenly finds himself enjoying the conversation a lot more.
Reflecting later, Agape recognizes an interesting pattern. His emotions were giving him information about his Values—patterns of attention around meaning. He felt an unpleasant emotion (frustration, a contraction in his chest and stomach) when he was the audience in a one-sided conversation. But as soon as the discussion became collaborative, he began feeling a pleasant emotion (enjoyment, a sense of openness in his body).
Care is the process by which emotions direct attention toward meaning. Pleasant emotions indicate that you are attuned to the flourishing of yourself, others, and the world. Unpleasant emotions tell you that some meaningful way of relating is blocked, threatened, neglected, or violated.
It can be confusing when Values (patterns of attention around meaning) seem to contradict each other. Resolving these conflicts often involves developing a more profound 👁️ View, attention patterns that enable more mature ❤️ Care. But when this process fails, unresolved conflicts in View and Care can lead to distortions…
A group of community leaders approach Agape, asking him to run for city mayor. It seems like a great idea, a chance to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. He is very excited in the meeting. But as soon as he walks out, he feels a sense of dread begin to grow in the pit of his stomach. Agape is confused by these unpleasant emotions. Why does the idea of running for mayor suddenly feel so horrible? He takes a walk with his cousin, and ends up crying for over an hour. Afterwards, he feels much better and begins making plans for his campaign. So what happened?
While talking to his cousin, Agape was able to tune into the “felt sense” of dread in his stomach. Agape realized that the feeling started in the fifth grade. He had been elected class president, and was full of idealism. The role didn’t come with any real power, and so he wasn’t able to solve any of his classmates’ problems. This left him feeling inadequate. Agape’s fifth-grade self didn’t know how to make sense of the experience. He pushed away his unpleasant feelings.
Agape’s confusion in the fifth grade left an impression of “the way thing are” in his 👁️ View that has been haunting him ever since. Unconsciously, it seemed like being in a position of power would mean he was helpless. This created a distortion in his Attention. When Agape was able to bring compassion to his younger self, he began sobbing, and felt the dread in his stomach begin to release.
❤️ Care uses emotions to direct Attention toward Values moment to moment. But this process can be distorted by deep-seated feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, hopelessness, and so on. Such Distortions need to be “cleaned up”, generating Insight that updates your 👁️ View and allows you to see reality more clearly.
Again, Care is the process by which emotions direct Attention toward meaning. By cleaning up Distortions about feeling helpless, Agape could to tune into the emotions that point him toward a Value: serving the needs of people in his community.
Well-functioning care, however, does not necessarily mean wise care. Mayor Agape could suffer burnout if he pays too much attention to the needs of his community and not enough to his own well-being. That kind of care is not wise. When ❤️ Care learns to support the flourishing of yourself, others, and the world over time, it becomes more mature—aligning profound view and skillful action.