The value of tradition
New Year is celebrated in Bali with a 24-hour period of silence and meditation known as “Nyepi,” a Balinese Hindu tradition since 78 AD.
Reading an instruction manual on how to ride a bicycle won’t teach us to ride. Having a PhD in physics doesn’t help either.
We have to fall a few times before we can find balance.
That experience of falling and eventually riding becomes intuition. It’s built upon what we perceive with our senses. Not rational insight. Intuition happens subconsciously.
But our own personal experiences will never be enough to lead to good intuition more broadly. Our lives are too short. Too narrow. The human experience spans continents and millennia. And there are lots of ways humans can fall.
That’s one reason cultures rely on tradition. Stories. Rituals. Customs.
Tradition supplements our own experiential intuition.
It’s a hack.
Honoring good traditions helps us reap the benefits of experiential intuition without the experience of falling.
Some examples:
Since 78 AD, New Year has been celebrated in Bali with a 24-hour period of silence and meditation known as Nyepi.
In Ukraine and Russia, it’s traditional to sit down for a few minutes as a family before leaving on a trip.
Polterbend is a German wedding custom. On the night before the wedding, guests share a dinner. And then break porcelain. Lots of it. The bride and groom clean it up together as a symbol of unity. And to demonstrate the value of working together.
And in every culture, parents tell their children fairy tales. Fables. Myths. Parables. Stories passed down from generation to generation intended to teach morals.
Einstein said:
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Good fairy tales tell deep and universal truths. And the deep and universal truths that make up the shared intuition of humankind can collectively be called wisdom.
Science and logic and mathematics are powerful, unmatched, tools for advancing human knowledge. But they don’t effectively pass wisdom from one generation to the next.
Not like good traditions can. Not like good stories can.
Tradition matters. Songs. Recipes. Prayers. Customs. Rituals. Fairy tales.
If we discard good traditions because we don’t understand them. Or because we just don’t see the point. We may be discarding an answer to an important question we haven’t yet thought to ask.
An answer that can help us stay balanced. And keep us from falling.
