A Gift

‘Tis the season for gift-giving! So today’s blog post is a gift: a book recommendation plus — bonus! — some excerpts from said book.

(And stay tuned! my next gift is a pair of socks.)

The book I recommend is The School of Life. I found it in a wonderful newsletter called Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. It immediately appealed to me because of its subtitle,

An Emotional Education,

as well as its first few paragraphs, beginning with

Modern societies are collectively deeply committed to education, and have in place the mechanisms needed to teach every conceivable profession and to cover every topic of enquiry.

And moving to

Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones.

Of course (the author, Alain de Botton, does not mention this), there is the burgeoning Social-Emotional Learning movement that offers teachers myriad curricula that are meant to teach students how to be emotionally intelligent. But The School of Life is not interested in content and curricula, in teaching other people how they should be. In a section titled “Emotional Intelligence” (p. 3), de Botton describes what he and The School of Life are after:

When we speak of emotional intelligence, we are alluding — in a humanistic rather than a scientific way — to whether someone understands key components of emotional functioning. We are referring to their ability to introspect and communicate, to read the moods of others, to relate with patience, charity, and imagination to the less edifying moments of those around them. The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.

Does this reassure you the way it does me? It is so true and down-to-earth and matter-of-fact (as is the rest of the book). It takes for granted an inescapable fact:

that human beings have control over only themselves.

So the work of emotional intelligence is not in delivering and receiving lessons, in controlling students’ exposure to content, but in muddling through everyday life, in doing relationships, in feeling and responding to emotions,

in modeling that muddling for students.

Alain de Botton minces no words about the importance of enacting and fostering emotional intelligence:

Sustained shortfalls in emotional intelligence are, sadly, no minor matter. There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.

Amen.