What’s intelligence to you, and are you intelligent? We’ve already established that my education is spotty. I missed a lot of stuff people usually do in high school. Or even middle school. I’ve never read War and Peace. That’s middle school, right? We established that I can’t do calculus. Give me a trigonometric break. I never learned a stitch of history. Everything I know about anything that happened before about 1990 is a result of me digging around and figuring s**t out. I was forty years old when I finally read The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

As a side note, what a gift! To be forty years old and grabbing hold of that piece of literature for the first time! Sinking my teeth into something as tasty as Tolkien as an adult, without any of the pesky distractions or misunderstandings of deep-youth. I didn’t read it when my mom told me to. I savored it thirty years later.

As a side note to the side note, I feel the same way about Rage Against The Machine. I discovered “Killing In The Name”, like, within the last six months or something. I’d heard the tune maybe? I’d heard of the band. But I was a good youth-group boy, and I wouldn’t have been able to get around the language element. And now it’s just such a morsel. Such a treat.

I am intelligent. I am convinced of that now. My back-lot GED had impressed upon me that I was less than functionally intelligent for a long time, if you can believe that. It’s the false equivalency of intelligence and education. I had to grow up and realize that the world was full of people with masters degrees who struggled in various emotional or intellectual pursuits that came more naturally to me.

My dad used to tell me “Nicholas, the world is completely full of idiots”. Which is kind of a shitty thing to say. I resisted it into my adulthood, and I still wouldn’t probably classify things that way. But I understand what he was trying to say. The world is full of people giving things half-effort. Full of people for whom “this” is just good enough. No further thought, no further analysis necessary. No need to continue thinking things through.

And I wonder if not starting off with firm footing in this area has prepared me to keep discovering. Keep thinking things through. I got street smarts. Or, rather, I got farm smarts.

And I guess I do value that quite a lot. I value my ability to think things through, to arrive at unique answers and solutions based on my lived experiences. That’s intelligence to me. It can’t be trivia. It can’t be arithmetic. It can’t even be knowledge.

It’s just about got to be about processing information and using that information to identify my values, which illuminate my beliefs, which inform my vision and mission in life, which, when applied and thoughtfully observed can shed light on my goals, which in turn can help me decide on and commit to my tasks which will inform my time management. It’s a line, see? It’s like a waterfall, with our lived experiences eventually informing our nuts-&-bolts actions and thoughts and activities in life.

Or like a tree, with lived experiences being represented by sun rays or rain drops. We can’t control them! We can’t even understand them, those rascally lived experiences.

They just happen to us. And our roots (our Values), informed by the mycorrhizae of our community, take up those nutrients to feed our Trunk (our Beliefs). Our Vision and Mission branch out from there... It all feeds into our goals, our tasks, our time management—the fruit that feeds the people around us. I haven’t thought this all the way through. Probably there’s some way to shoehorn photosynthesis into this metaphorical tree? I’m still workshopping this.

What about you? How do you define intelligence? Are we intelligent? Are we intellectually lazy? Are we thoughtful? Are we interested? Interesting? What lived experiences have informed your values setting process?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nickfromoregon.substack.com