INTRA-PERSONAL INTELLIGENCE

Plato admonished us above all to “Know Thyself.” Yet, commandeering several hours of a child’s day for schoolwork and homework focused on the three R’s leaves little time to play, to dream, to know thyself. Anxious parents, unwittingly escalate this system of hoops and measures that fails to promote the deepest, highest, and most human potentials. These potentials, once awakened lead not to mere jobs or careers, but to lives of passionate involvement with one’s chosen life work; to vocations that are also avocations, i.e. lives replete with joyful fulfillment.

Howard Gardner, author of Multiple Intelligences asserts that along with higher thinking such as the generating and pondering of ideas, and empathy, the frontal lobes play a central role in intrapersonal intelligence.  Whereas, interpersonal intelligence allows one to understand and work with others, intrapersonal intelligence allows one to understand and work with oneself.

My own observation is that those who at least have one empathic role model in childhood are more likely to achieve the intrapersonal intelligence that leads to a soul satisfying vocation. In my case that role model was my mother. To her compassionate, understanding guidance, I attribute knowing from a young age that I wanted to become a teacher, not to constrain their exuberance, but to promote their love of learning.

Yesterday, I had the great joy of witnessing, crowds of awestruck people exclaim over the extraordinary beauty of my life partner’s photography at “Art in Bloom” in Mckinney, Texas.  People came forward to peer behind the photographs and ask if a hidden light source illumined his photos.

Fred discovered his love of photography, and corresponding talent for it, in his fifties. It has been a joy to observe his emergence from a career that simply earned him a living, to this passionate involvement with capturing nature’s beauty with his photography.

People were astonished that this was the 68 year old’s first photography show. When I ponder why this extraordinary talent emerged at all, I credit his close relationship with a very kind and caring mother who accepted him for who he was. Why do I think it took so long for Fred to ‘know his passion’? Because of being pressed into a left-brain, non-creative societal bias and schooling from childhood on. At a loss as to how to develop the soulful expression of a human being, we devalue and negate its power for personal transformation.

According to Kathryn Bensinger, author of The Art of Using your Whole Brain, droves of people end up in the therapist’s office in their forties. Many were told as young adults to put aside foolish dreams and earn degrees for practical professions that would earn them decent wages.  These include people from all walks of life: Accountants who put aside their art at a young age; office managers who long to work with the soil; business professional who would rather be homemakers; house painters who are frustrated writers, and on and on--all miserable; many on the brink of a new beginning based on intra-personal intelligence or self-knowledge.

It takes courage and commitment to allow both children and ourselves to follow the path less traveled. For those of any age, who are awakening to their intrapersonal intelligence, to the inner voice that connects them to their deepest, highest, most meaningful, and therefore joyful modes of self-expression—these true and inspiring words of Goethe offer a guiding light:

COMMITMENT

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy,

The chance to draw back,

Always ineffectiveness.

Concerning acts of initiative and creation,

There is one elementary truth,

The ignorance of which, kills

Countless ideas and splendid plans:

That the moment one definitely commits oneself,

Then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one

That would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision,

Raising, in one’s favor all manner

Of unforeseen incidents and meetings

And material assistance which

No one could have dreamt would come their way.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Begin it now.

                                                                        Johann Wolfgang Goethe