Cultivating Excellence

Excellence

In the Athens of Aristotle, discussions around value and ethics would often feature the word arete, meaning ‘excellence’, or ‘fulfilling potential’. Arete could refer to the way that an eye is good for seeing with, a horse good at carrying its rider, or to a person’s courage, or their ability to think logically.

It’s a useful concept, for it gives us a practical way to think about how to live well. We can spend time working out how to become more excellent.

If we sustain our attention on any aspect of how we’re living our lives, we’ll see the way we’re living afresh. We’ll make connections. We’ll have insights.

The four excellences

Our investigations can help us become excellent in four ways:

1. Excellence of alignment. If we investigate the overall landscapes of our lives, considering what most matters to us, what we might be able to achieve, and what the best path forwards would be, the insights we have will help us navigate the world intelligently at a big picture level. We become aligned with the futures that, upon examination, we believe to be most worth reaching.
2. Social excellence. If we investigate how we cooperate with others, considering how we slot into place within relationships, groups and teams, and how we step up to provide leadership when we sense that it’s needed, the insights we have will keep us socially aligned. We’ll find a harmony with those who share our worlds with us.
3. Excellence of orientation. If we investigate how we make our in-moment choices of what to do, considering how our personal organisation practices support those choices, and how we can build habits of making sound choices from moment to moment, the insights we have in the moment will help us keep oriented. They will ensure that our in-moment intentions reflect our big picture visions.
4. Excellence of performance. If we investigate how we perform once we’ve chosen what to do, considering how we might build our skills and how we can best make use of our conscious minds, the insights we have will help us perform at our best. We will discover ways to act that satisfy our aesthetic sense of what makes for beautiful action.

The discipline of aesthetics

When we’ve completed sufficient investigations, our aesthetic sensibilities become reliable guides to living well. If we sense that a course of action would lead to ugliness of any kind, we then pause and search for a better way to go about things.

There are two aspects to the discipline of aesthetics. There’s the aesthetic direction we arrive at through actively sensing our alignment with the greater wholes that enfold us. New strands of meaning will appear as we take note of futures we’d rather avoid and connect with the most desirable of possibilities.

Then there’s the aesthetic action that we embody when we actively sense the potential for beauty and ugliness in the immediacy of the moment we’re in and abandoning ourselves to the lines of action we judge to be the most harmonious. We’re always at the creative front of life. Our sensibilities can help us find actions that weave new order into the fabric of the universe.

If everyone followed the discipline of aesthetics, the world would be a happier place. It’s when the world remains untasted that suffering and destruction run rampant.

The boon of freedom

When we start living aesthetically, we find that living well is ultimately simple. We embrace reality as it is. We make aesthetic choices of what to do next. And we act as elegantly as we can.

If we’re aesthetic, we can trust our actions to transport us towards the futures that we’ve seen to be most worth reaching. So we can do what we truly like doing.

There’s always more to experience than can be captured in any mental map. Our experiences will continue to be complex and enigmatic. The path can be simple, but the world it travels through is not.

To live aesthetically is to live an examined life. It is to live well in all the ways it’s possible to live well. There’s nothing more satisfying. Self-doubt dissolves and in its place appears freedom.