Becoming Meritorious Biological Learning Machines

Homo Intelligentsia is hardly a set of tricks designed to allow us to magically become something we are not. It is the art and science of learning who we are — and of creating the most meritorious version of ourselves we can imagine.

Once we accept who we are as the most perfectly designed creation imaginable — imperfections, sensitivities, allergies, fears, gifts and all — we can begin to work with the challenges we encounter instead of fighting against them or pretending they do not exist. Do this for ourselves, and we can move on to helping others do the same.

I was born into a family ill-equipped to deal with such an individual as myself: highly allergic, highly sensitive, highly intelligent. As my daughter — a Jungian therapist — describes it from her professional perspective, I am an HSP: a Highly Sensitive Person. Our world is full of HSPs, all of us looking for answers in a landscape that sometimes seems to have gone mad.

As an HSP, I spent my life figuring out how to negotiate existence with what felt, for many years, like an overly complicated set of personal limitations. I had to learn — early and painfully — to turn negatives into positives.

As a child I moved beyond the family that could not manage to handle such a child, and sought out those who could meet me at least halfway. I chose to do this as an athlete — in the water.

I found, in the competitive experience of striving to get better at something that truly challenged me, a way of engaging with other children and with a coach who could provide the environment I needed. In the minds of others it was unremarkable that a fifty-pound nine-year-old would work so hard to become a competitor in the pool — especially as my medals were only third place. What those fellow humans missed was that this was everything for a highly allergic young girl: learning the courage to be myself, at just the right time, in just the right place, with just the right human beings.

Today I have lived a whole life supported by the courage I learned in the water. I learned to swim fast as a small but effective human form, breaking down the resistance and drag by becoming a more streamlined shape. In learning to perform water ballet and to dive, I applied similar principles to overcome what seemed like overwhelming odds.

The water never changed its nature. What changed was my relationship to it.

As a nine-year-old, the pool was a place of resistance, drag, shortness of breath, and fear of not being able to finish the length. I had to learn to reduce drag — not by fighting the water harder, but by becoming more hydrodynamic: tucking the chin, extending the reach, rotating the body, breathing in rhythm rather than in panic.

The same laws govern the ocean today. The wave is not the enemy. The resistance is not the enemy. The drag — whether physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual — is not the enemy. The enemy is the illusion that we must overpower it with brute force or pretend it does not exist.

"The meritorious path is to become more streamlined in our being: align with the direction of flow, reduce unnecessary turbulence, breathe in rhythm with the challenge rather than against it."

This is not self-improvement for its own sake. It is the disciplined art of becoming a more faithful biological learning machine — one that learns not only faster, but deeper, truer, and more compassionately.

Once we accept our own design — sensitivities, intensities, limits and all — we stop wasting energy fighting the water and start using it to move forward.

That same discipline scales. When enough biological learning machines begin to streamline their own lives — turning drag into direction, fear into rhythm, resistance into glide — the whole society begins to change. We become a civilization no longer defined by who can overpower whom, but by who can move most harmoniously with the deeper currents of reality.

A meritorious, compassionate civilization is not built by perfect people. It is built by people who have learned to reduce their own unnecessary turbulence so they can help reduce turbulence in others.

The highly allergic, highly sensitive child who once struggled to breathe in a pool can become the adult who helps others find their rhythm in a much larger ocean. That is Homo Intelligentsia in action: not a superhuman species, but a species that finally learns to swim with — rather than against — the very nature it was given.

The wave is mammoth. The drag is real. The resistance is everywhere. But so is the possibility of becoming more streamlined, more graceful, more merciful — one breath, one question, one choice at a time.

We do not have to become something we are not. We only have to become the most meritorious version of who we already are. And when enough of us do that together, the civilization that emerges will be one worth living in — and worth passing on.

Paddle when you're ready. Breathe when you can. Love anyway. — KW Norton