It’s Day 1 of the Rupert “The Spiralizer” Spira retreat in Norway.

The clouds are grey, the weather is dreary and there’s a chill in the air. But inside the retreat, The Spiralizer has been well and truly bringing the heat!

One of my takeaways from Rupert’s first session was this:

There’s a big difference between knowing yourself and knowing about yourself.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Antifragile and The Black Swan, once wrote that “the problem with knowledge is that there are many more books written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds”.

i.e. our knowledge of birds is always one step removed. It’s always observational.

Now apply this to us.

To me, it’s like saying that if you want to get to know yourself, taking an Enneagram test, an inventory of your hobbies or running through your life story might not be the best way to go about it.

This is all knowledge about yourself, just like an ornithologist writing a book about a bird.

But knowing yourself doesn’t come from collecting data about yourself.

It comes from yourself.

The Spiralizer shared a funky metaphor about the Sun that brought this home.

The Sun illuminates the Earth (even though Norway seems to have missed the memo). 

This is like us gathering facts about who we are by looking from the outside in. Could be useful and might be interesting but it’s always observational and impersonal.

Thing is though, the Sun doesn’t need an external source of illumination to light itself up.

It illuminates itself.

By the same token, what if the best way to know myself isn’t by defining myself as an INTP or trawling through all my dodgy memories?

What if it's by knowing myself directly? Almost as if that knowing is already built in.

Maybe the wise old owl Lao Tzu was pointing to the same idea when he said “at the centre of your being, you have the answer; you know who you are, and you know what you want”.

Truth be told, I'm still sitting with this one. 

But it does feel like I'm looking in the right direction.

Anyway, that’s all the time I've got for now. I'm off to don my woolly jumper and go for a quick walk before the next session.