“We seek a timeless region, an eternal presence in complete quiet, lying beyond human clocks and calendars altogether. The quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man. This small non-time space in the very heart of time.”
--Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, 1977
Reflective and Empathetic Learners
Intrapersonal Intelligence
Self knowledge means knowing who you are, what you can do, and what you want to do. Awareness of one's inner state of being is powerful.
These students try to understand their inner feelings, recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, evaluate their thinking patterns, and understand their role in relation to others.
These students try to understand their inner feelings, recognize their own strengths and weaknesses, evaluate their thinking patterns, and understand their role in relation to others.
The "Self Smart" Student
- Often exhibits unusual wisdom
- Introspective or unusually quiet
- Develops wonderful ideas, experiments, dreams, or inventions
- Enjoys individual or self-paced activities
- Sometimes labeled "shy" or a "loner"
- Team projects can make this student weary
- Can be hypercritical--often too hard on himself/herself
Dr. Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotion
Famous Intrapersonal Learners
Neil Armstrong
Clara Barton Anne Frank |
Helen Keller
Charles Lindbergh Socrates |
Hannah Arendt suggested thoughtful, sensitive, creative people need periodic respite from the heavily cognitive activities of thinking, willing, and judging.
She was not advocating a complete and permanent withdrawal or a self-defensive stance of indifference. Rather, she encouraged the most thoughtful among is to practice periodic times of detachment—still caring deeply about the issues around us (global warming, inequalities) while understanding they are in progress of changing and their resolution belongs to the future.
So long as there are gifted young people who care
—you, right here and now, reading this--
the future is in good hands.
It is the fate, based on the influence of genetics (nature) and experience (nurture), of every human being to be a unique individual, to find our own path, to live our own life, with people we chose to surround ourselves with and those we encounter in our journey.
After having read and traveled and thought and written, there needs to be a time of reflection. The potential for taking action to make changes in our world lies in the capacity to exhume or turn over the raw material of our study and experience so that it can be subjected to our creative process. We examine ideas, accept some, reject others, and retranscribe our newly-minted conclusions, allowing us to be ready to experience, grow, and change once again.
Such internal mental remodelings are not only crucial to the sensitive, thoughtful person's senses of mental, emotional, and spiritual balance but are a very necessary part of being able to fully and willingly connect with daily human life. The major (and sometimes world-changing) transformations, philosopher Friedrich Nietzche's “revaluations of all values,” come from these private, quiet times when we commune with a unique private self.
Recharging and reflection are primary human needs, fundamental ways of making sense of our world that we must make time for in our days and ways.