On letters & ther hidden meaning: response to a fellow blogger (Part 2)

This is the sec­ond part of a com­ment to a post from a fel­low blog­ger. You can find his post here, and the first part to my response here. I hope you enjoy these new reflec­tions on his essay about the dan­gers of overspecialisation.

- The crazy Colombian

REFLECTIVE COMMENT #2 — ON LETTERS AND THEIR HIDDEN MEANING

Andrés Melo Cousineau, a fel­low blog­ger, wrote ‘Reflec­tions: T and Omega, a crit­i­cal stance on our dan­ger­ous desire for over­spe­cial­iza­tion’. With it, Andres takes us on a jour­ney of reflec­tion about the strong under­ly­ing cur­rent of over-specialisation in mod­ern soci­ety; warns us of its per­ils; and artic­u­lates an alter­na­tive: The proac­tive and con­scious devel­op­ment of ‘Omega-type’ of indi­vid­u­als, through the appli­ca­tion of lib­eral edu­ca­tion principles.

In his essay Andres reflects on let­ters, their hid­den mean­ing and their val­ues. I par­tic­u­larly enjoyed Andres’ tran­scrip­tion of Anne Carson’s Eros the bit­ter­sweet, a poem where an illit­er­ate man describes with great beauty the let­ters (in Greek) of the word The­seus. At the end of his rumi­na­tions, Andres encour­ages us to reflect on the let­ters that make our own name. What addi­tional insights about our­selves could be hid­den in their form? What addi­tional beauty can we find in their intrin­sic shapes?

I decided to take Andres’ chal­lenge, and look at my ini­tials: the lettes ‘D’ and ‘V’. As soon as I thought about it, I realised the high degree of sym­bol­ism hid­den in them. We’ll get to that in a few min­utes. Let me first review some of Andres’ ideas. In his writ­ing, Andres’ shares an equa­tion that is a good syn­the­sis of the evo­lu­tion he advocates:

? < T < ? < > ? ?

On the left hand side, we have an upward arrow; a sym­bol of the for­ever increas­ing lev­els of spe­cial­i­sa­tion in our mod­ern soci­ety. On the right-hand side, we have the let­ter omega, a sym­bol of a well-rounded indi­vid­ual that results from dis­ci­plined appli­ca­tion of a lib­eral approach to edu­ca­tion, both in the class­room and out­side of it.

Accord­ing to this sequence, My ini­tial (D, or in greek, ?) tells me that I am two steps short of the ‘high­est’ level attain­able in Andres’ evo­lu­tion­ary hier­ar­chy. To some extent, this is in con­cor­dance with my self image of a self-actualised ‘T-minded’ type who is on a jour­ney to become more well-rounded. My own self-image is that of some­one who is expand­ing his hori­zons and wants to develop skills at a deeper level than I cur­rently have, but doesn’t want to become an expert in only one topic. In other words, I believe I am try­ing to become exactly what Andres’ describes as a ‘Well rounded ?–type indi­vid­ual’. I can also see how I am beyond the mere ‘T-type’, with its shal­low­est under­stand­ing of all top­ics except that in which exper­tise has been built. Accord­ing to Andres’ hier­ar­chy, I can safely say I would con­sider myself a Delta (?), and my Name’s ini­tial con­firms this.

What about my last name’s ini­tial? The let­ter V reminded me of Dan Brown’s best seller The Da Vinci Code. In this book, Dan brown tells us that the let­ter V sym­bol­izes the womb, where all life is cre­ated; and the chal­ice, where ‘the blood of Christ’ is col­lected for the sacra­ment of com­mu­nion. What could this say about me?

Using the image of the womb, I could say that maybe my ini­tial moti­vates me to be a nur­tur­ing per­son; to be one that cares about help­ing oth­ers grow and learn. I think of myself as some­one with a pas­sion for teach­ing and help­ing oth­ers’ in what­ever jour­ney they’re in; whether that’s the way I come across or not, I guess, is some­thing I might have to ask oth­ers. Nev­er­the­less, if I take my most recent project (‘Pass it For­ward’) as an indi­ca­tion of how I really am, it may agree with that mean­ing of the let­ter V.

A sec­ond expla­na­tion is that I am some­one with a deep spir­i­tual vein; some­one for whom sym­bols and rit­u­als are impor­tant. This is only partly true. From an early age in my catholic upbring­ing, I aban­doned the rit­u­als of going to church on a reg­u­lar basis and par­tic­i­pat­ing on the sacra­ment of com­mu­nion. On the other hand, I have built into my life a series of rit­u­als (let’s call them habits) that sus­tain my spir­i­tual growth; The lat­est one of which is a dis­ci­pline to med­i­tate either at the start of (or in the mid­dle of) the day. Either way, this desire to build rou­tines and rit­u­als to achieve a deeper level of spir­i­tu­al­ity in my life could res­onate with the sec­ond mean­ing of the let­ter V.

There is a third, more sin­is­ter mean­ing of the let­ter V worth con­sid­er­ing. As Andres reminded us, Shaw once said “More and more, we know more of less; until there will come a time when we will know much of noth­ing, and noth­ing of the whole.” In a very graphic way, the let­ter V depicts this jour­ney: At its top, we have a broad base, which then nar­rows quickly, like a fun­nel; until we end up cov­er­ing the uni-dimensional space of a dot (“Until we know (…) noth­ing of the whole”). In this mean­ing I see a hid­den warn­ing within my own ini­tial to avoid over­spe­cial­i­sa­tion. Why would such a warn­ing be required when I am a Delta-type of indi­vid­ual? Because at my most-inner core, there is a deep pas­sion for suc­cess; and in today’s world, suc­cess is directly cor­re­lated to the level of over­spe­cial­i­sa­tion one has. Thus a warn­ing is required.

As I wrote this, I was reminded of an Ora­cle tool that I use with fre­quency, and the way it describes many sit­u­a­tions. This tool is the I Ching , an ancient Chi­nese book also called ‘the book of changes’. It is based on hexa­grams of bro­ken and solid lines, with 64 pos­si­ble per­mu­ta­tions. Each hexa­gram is com­posed of two ‘core’ tri­grams; and each tri­gram has its own name. Think about the I Ching’s hexa­grams as the ini­tials to two names. Inter­est­ingly, in the descrip­tion of each ora­cle sign found in the Span­ish trans­la­tion of this book, you will encounter very graph­i­cal descrip­tions and inter­pre­ta­tions of the tri­grams and hexa­grams. For exam­ple, it will say things such as ‘With weak ele­ments on the tips and strong ele­ments in the mid­dle, this hexa­gram rep­re­sents a wooden beam, under some pres­sure and strain, bend­ing at the tips in its weak­est points.” (N.B. I am writ­ing this from mem­ory, so it may not be totally accu­rate). This type of analy­sis of the FORM of a sym­bol reminded me of what Andres did in his entry, and of what hap­pened as I took on his rec­om­men­da­tion to ask myself the hid­den mean­ing of my own name’s letters.

But enough about me. The rea­son I started writ­ing this post was because as Andres reflected on the tran­si­tion from an upward arrow (I con­tend it should point down­ward) to a T, to a ?(Delta), to an Omega, I was reminded of some­thing else. As some of you may know, I worked for one of the world’s top Strate­gic Busi­ness Con­sult­ing Firms. Within ‘The Firm’ (as they called them­selves) there was a strat­egy to develop in their peo­ple ‘dou­ble T’ type of individuals.

What did they mean by this? Well, that they wanted to offer the oppor­tu­nity to their con­sul­tants to work across a broad range of top­ics; whilst at the same time help them develop a deep spe­cial­ist ‘spike’. Why dou­ble T? Because there should, ide­aly, be two spikes: An indus­try they get to really know; and a func­tional area they are experts in. So for exam­ple, you may became a spe­cial­ist in Finan­cial Ser­vices (Indus­try) and Oper­a­tions (func­tion); Or in Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions (Indus­try) and Mar­ket­ing (Func­tion). In some cases, the spikes were much deeper: I devel­oped exper­tise in Mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics (deep func­tional spike) for Finan­cial Ser­vices organ­i­sa­tions (Indus­try spike).

This brings us back to the let­ter Omega. To some extent, the let­ter still has two ‘foun­da­tions’ at its base; It also rep­re­sents an Arch, with its implicit bal­ance sup­ported by two solid foun­da­tions. This con­fig­u­ra­tion really res­onated with my pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence of ‘dou­ble spikes’; And so there is one more rea­son why the let­ter Omega, in addi­tion to its illus­tra­tion of ‘Well rounded’ indi­vid­u­als, can also give way to the idea that our spe­cial­i­sa­tion should be in two areas, not just one. It is those areas that become the foun­da­tion for a well bal­anced, well rounded individual

Tagged as: Essays, Ideas, Over-Specialisation, Philosophy, Reflections