The One Essential Quality

An excerpt on metis, danger, and navigating the gods

The wine-dark tumult of the vasting sea; the hearty slap of waves on wood; salted wind batters tilted sails, and every surging wave plays its own fate, a flowing swell of sinuous strength. To our ancestors, the ocean was a god, a boundless intelligence, powerful beyond kenning. And still they carved boats from the forest, still they set out to navigate the broad back of the waves. They died by the dozens, not from malice but the casual indifference of profligate force. And still they set sail again, again, again; still they entrusted themselves to their own cunning and surrender; to Mastery immersed in Mystery.

The Polynesian wayfinders, they knew the sea better than most. Babies chosen to be navigators would spend their days in tidal pools around their islands, developing an instinct, before they could even speak, for the ocean’s currents, its rushes, its salt and wind.

On the sea, they didn’t sleep – their awareness was intense and open, held in spacious tension like a bow with its string pulled back, ready.

You can’t think about every factor in navigation. You can’t waste time and effort running down a checklist of relevant sights, sounds, tastes, smells, feels, and intuitions. You must be taut, vast, spontaneously replying to each of the sea’s signals before you realize you’ve heard them.

Everything is relevant, when you immerse yourself in the forces of nature; anything you ignore could be the last thing you ignore. The feel of the sea – how its currents move. The winds, how they land on your face. The taste of the sea, its brine — is freshwater mixing in, further up-current?, there could be an island that way. Watch the underside of the clouds, where the sun reflects back off the sea; can you see a shadow there, a dark spot where an island interrupts the ocean’s mirror? Even in daytime, know the position of every constellation, be able to name each star on the horizon, even at high noon.  

This way of being, this “presence and continuous alertness” where we can be “always aware of the whole without excluding anything” is a hallmark not just of one seafaring tradition, but of most of the crafts that kept our ancestors alive and flourishing. 

Peter Kingsley, a Classics scholar and modern mystic, uses the Greek word metis to describe this way of being, this

particular quality of intense alertness that can be effortlessly aware of everything at once. …Metis feels, listens, watches; can even be aware at the same time… of every thought drifting into and out of our consciousness. It misses nothing.

This quality isn’t just “the one essential quality navigators need,” it’s the quality we all need to pull off the miracles of life and culture that make this world work.

In my own world, I’ve tasted that essential quality in heightened situations. Certain days driving home in Hanoi, metis would take me.

The hundreds of bikes and cars moving unpredictably required of me an intense focus in all directions at once, a broad awareness and an intense focus working as one. If I couldn’t track the speed, direction, and distance of every vehicle behind and ahead of me, and stay open to noticing potholes, sudden braking cars, or swerving buses – I might not survive the drive home. I’d seen enough dead bodies and broken bones on the roads to know that traffic was powerful and indifferent to me, the way the ocean is to sailors, the way the jungle is to hunters. 

Average non-rush-hour traffic in Hanoi

On certain magic days, when the traffic and my focus merged into a liquid exchange, something would happen and I’d be beyond focus and awareness. Beyond my self and my neck-swiveling calculations of swerving trajectories. On those days, I was a fluid entity of sensory intuition – heat on the side of my face and the thick tang of stale diesel exhaust told me without looking that I had a bus to my left. The honks and revs around me, the way each one muffled, or grew shriller, or faded, became an internal picture of the vehicles around me – how they were rushing up on me, turning to a side street, falling behind… The flicker of red reflection off the edge of my glasses told me the car ahead had tapped its brake lights. The sudden drop of the bike’s engine a few feet away told me they were suddenly braking in reaction. 

Wordlessly, thoughtlessly, acting simply as an aspect of the situation pouring around and through me, I banked left and revved to get ahead of the bus, before it could block me off from the gap between it and the truck in front of us. I couldn’t see the traffic ahead, but everything I could see, hear, feel, and smell (the exhaust got a touch thicker, didn’t it?) told me there was a blockage in traffic ahead on the right side – and my experience with these roads told me obstacles like that don’t stay on one side of the road for long, they spread quickly until only a trickle of traffic can make it through the gridlock. I could either break ahead of the mess right now, from the left, or I’d be stuck here for 10 minutes waiting. I slipped through the gap just before the bus closed it, and sped out ahead. Me and the 2 or 3 others who had banked left rushed out into open road as the knot behind us tightened.

Metis leaves a signature. Even when it goes un-mentioned, you can feel it in certain descriptions. Anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson tells anecdotes about hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea in his essay on “Preconquest Consciousness.” What Sorenson called liminal or preconquest consciousness often sounds a lot like metis:

One day, deep within the forest, Agaso, then about 13 years of age, found himself with a rare good shot at a cuscus in a nearby tree. But he only had inferior arrows. Without the slightest comment or solicitation, the straightest, sharpest arrow of the group moved so swiftly and so stealthily straight into his hand, I could not see from whence it came.

At that same moment, Karako, seeing that the shot would be improved by pulling on a twig to gently move an obstructing branch, was without a word already doing so, in perfect synchrony with Agaso's drawing of the bow, i.e., just fast enough to fully clear Agaso's aim by millimeters at the moment his bow was fully drawn, just slow enough not to spook the cuscus.

Only presence and continuous alertness can so effortlessly accomplish feats like that. Only metis. If the boys had been walking around with the narrow awareness we tend towards, ignoring most of their senses and most of their environment the way we do, the whole event would have been awkward fumbling and clumsy whispers while the cuscus ran away.

In metis, we attend with spaciousness and intensity to everything, not just to what we’ve already decided should matter.

One of the last traditionally trained Polynesian wayfinders, Mau Piailug, gave a casual demonstration of metis, while visiting Hawaii to teach his craft. His student tells the story:

Mau can unlock the signs of the ocean world and can feel his way through the ocean. Mau is so powerful. The first time Mau was in Hawai‘i… someone asked him where the Southern Cross was. Mau, without turning around or moving his head, pointed in the direction of a brightly lit street lamp. I was curious and checked it. I ran around the street light and there, just where Mau had pointed, was the Southern Cross. It’s like magic; Mau knows where something is without seeing it.

Can you point to where the sun is right now, without thinking about it or looking around? On the average night, if I asked you to point at the moon without looking, could you do it? What would it take, for you to be continuously casually aware of all the major constellations in the night sky, in the same way you’re continuously casually aware of your own feet and the ground they’re standing on; of your own hands and what they’re holding?

Metis is not entirely lost. Most of us have felt some flicker of it, the way you can feel what a wildfire is like by standing too close to a bonfire. Just enough to get an idea of how much more is possible; of how overwhelmingly total it could be.

In our world, it’s hard to find domains where practical metis is still allowed, let alone encouraged.

This kind of wayfinding open awareness is unavoidably intuitive, opportunistic, attuned to its own rhythm. It requires deep care, endless hours of improvisational practice, multi-sensory awareness, and failure after failure. It doesn’t lend itself to a consistent, assembly-line approach. It can’t be trained by sitting students in a room and talking at them.

Trying to develop metis at most jobs will end your career, or at the very least make your superiors very uncomfortable with you.

The few places where some kind of metis is still encouraged, or at least where its development isn’t suspect, are in domains like the arts, sports, and spirituality. Domains where you can train intensely, make your whole life about something for a significant period of time, and – maybe most importantly – playfully try out new methods, new approaches, strange silly nothings that just arise in the moment; domains where spontaneous intuitions can play themselves out before you notice they’re happening, let alone before you have a chance to clamp down on them and Take This Seriously.

Also – and this is vital – these are domains where multi-sensory attention gets rewarded. Metis is multidimensional, it needs a rich landscape of relevant details to draw from, to connect into a unified texture of salience. In wayfinding, everything from the feel of the wind on your face to the taste of the water to the sound of waves lapping against the boat is included, they all paint a part of the picture. In hunting, there’s the smell, the spatial awareness, the bodily grace and strength of the hunter, the insights into the mind of prey – it all has to be included.

In sports, art, even spiritual practice, there’s a rich field of sensory, emotional, and mental experience to draw from, to weave together, to make a gestalt of. The sound of other football players rushing to tackle you, the smell of sweat breezing up to your left. The gestalt awareness of a painter, their sense of the whole composition of a piece, of color and shape, the smell of the paints, the subtle, fluid movements required to effect a particular brush stroke. A meditator’s intuitive flash of how a particular scent brings up a particular memory, how that memory invokes a particular emotional template – an inner sensory landscape, and a realization of this landscape’s malleable seams.

In a job that consists mostly of sitting at a desk, scheduling, sending messages, and sitting in meetings, there’s no place for your sense of smell to be useful; for your spatial awareness to provide critical information; for your intuitive sense of your coworker’s movements 1 second in the future to be useful. If intuitive multi-sensory awareness can’t be useful, it won’t be used. There’s just no place for metis in much of the world as it currently stands.

This is part of what draws so many people to art, sports, meditation and other callings that both welcome and challenge their full complement of human capacities. For so many people, these are the only places in their lives – in their worlds – where they can find that core human birthright: flow, metis, intuitive competence that shades into effortless mastery; like how a bird, in its moments of truest flight, must lose the feeling that it is riding the wind, and melt into the sense that he has joined the wind.

Humankind loves that feeling. The pursuit of that feeling leads inevitably to feats of mastery, from sailing to hunting to dodging tackles; from heart-quaking prose to weaving expertly through Hanoi traffic in rush hour.

I wish I didn’t have to say that those dangerous, exhaust-fume-reeking days in Hanoi were some of the greatest peak experiences of my life, but here we are. I have journal entries from that year, long winding devotional prose poems to the Goddess of the Gap – an embodiment of that perfect gap in traffic that moves with divine smoothness, if you can just devote yourself to it and prove yourself worthy of staying in it. 

I’d found some twisted form of metis on those streets, and I came literal inches from death over and over again in pursuit of it.

I don’t think the threat of death or danger is incidental, by the way.

Metis is often referred to as a kind of cunning, a wily and tricksy thing. Peter Goodyear, an expert in complex education design, says metis is particularly useful in “less well-defined circumstances, where [we] are not matched evenly against well-behaved forces.” It’s needed for work where we “modify and engage with a threatening, dynamic environment.”

His summarized definition of metis calls it “embodied intelligence in action: fit for uncertain times, ambiguous spaces, and unequal competitions.”

If you know the work that neuropsychologist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has done on the two hemispheres of the brain, big flashing lights may have been going off in your head all through this essay. His descriptions of “right hemisphere dominance” match up nearly point for point with what I’ve been calling metis. I’ve written more about this elsewhere, but the major overlaps focus on: open awareness; embodiment; intense direct perception of both parts and wholes; and dynamic, practical responsiveness to a living environment.

Since we see so many qualities of the right hemisphere in metis at first glance, it’s not surprising that we’d find more with a deeper look. And to press the point back towards danger and threat: in just about every species with a split brain (basically all vertebrates), the right hemisphere is associated with keeping an eye out for threats. It approaches the world with an open, spacious intensity appropriate for noticing the unknown and unexpected, and responding to it quickly.

The threat of danger isn’t incidental to metis; it’s woven into this entire cluster of qualities. 

There’s another angle on metis and danger that’s worth looking at. It’s not just that threatening, dynamic environments were a constant reality for wayfinders and hunters and Hanoi traffic; and it’s not just that they were called out by thinkers as disparate as Classics scholars, educators, and neuroscientists. 

All of that is enough, but I actually think artists and athletes can be even clearer – and maybe more amusing – practical examples for us.

Maybe you’ve noticed: artists get dramatic about their art. The novel they’re working on is a fight for their very soul. Their next series of paintings holds a damning mirror up to 500 years of western culture. This song has to come out right, because it must, because fate hangs in the balance, because it’s all riding on this. Art is life and death, art is the fecund soil of Existence itself, what is the purpose of life if not Art??

Artists need to engage a sense of life and death, of fate in the balance, of dynamic threat and urgent response, because without it, metis is harder to come by. You have to feel in your marrow that something is at stake. Artists understand this intuitively – as do athletes.

I used to find interviews with professional athletes hilarious; they talk so seriously, give so much weight to what is Literally Just A Game. From the way they talk, it’s like their very Being is on the line. Now, I get it – the pursuit of metis has to court risk. If you don’t have the ocean waiting to crush you, or a puma stalking you through the forest, you have to manufacture your own sense of stakes, of generative urgency. It’s a functional ingredient in the dynamic.

I drove around Hanoi without a helmet for a long time. I didn’t really understand why. It was stupid, I knew it was stupid. I felt really Alive without it though, and I couldn’t figure out how I could be so smart in so many ways, and so deadly stupid about this – and how even while knowing all this and thinking about it, I kept not wearing a helmet, because some blood-deep devotion to the Goddess of the Gap was somehow making me Alive, waking up some latent essence that had been sleeping inside me my whole life.

The arrow doesn’t fly if the bowstring is never pulled taut. Without tension – true, dangerous tension – you never even get the opportunity to hit the target.¹

Metis is for asymmetrical relationships. Metis is a way of negotiating gods, the way you’d negotiate a mountain path or a thick jungle. If you believe in your bones that you are superior to what you’re navigating, there can be no metis.

If you’re relaxed, slack, inattentive – if your very soul doesn’t depend on the quality of your attention in each moment – there can be no metis.

Our culture thinks we’ve conquered nature. Even space travel feels like a sure thing, basically an IOU away. There’s a certainty in the air that nothing bad can really happen to us, not in a way that matters. We’ll colonize the moon and cure cancer and probably fix the oceans and the rainforests and the healthcare system; it’s all fine, just wait around a bit. We’re bored of the wildfires and the hurricanes. The prospect of global war is treated as an academic question, a curio, an annoying stressor roughly on par with getting fired.

There are no predators, there are no gods – there’s no force greater than we humans, so it’s time to relax, time to narrow your focus. Get lost in a tv show. Do your breathing exercises, work on your resting heart rate. Get your 10,000 steps and do your sun salutations. Maybe learn Spanish. Get enough magnesium and go to the sauna; have you tried a float tank?

Keep your earphones in all day, do everything you can to block out the flashing lights, the smell of trash, the shouting neighbors, the faint taste of exhaust and asphalt. Don’t let your sensory experience get in the way of keeping a low heart rate and a mild THC buzz. Don’t let touch starvation get in the way of your benefits package.

The ingredients for metis – intense open attention, sensory breadth, playfulness, intuition, a sense of possibility woven deeply with generative danger – they get rarer and rarer, each and every one, each and every year. They’re rarer not because we lack fortitude, or because we’re failures or fallen creatures not up to the task – but because generation after generation, we’ve built a world with little room for anything like playful failure, awareness of death, wide-open senses, and everything else metis needs to arise. We’ve degraded the soil, and there’s nowhere for metis to put down roots.

We could try to fake it, of course. Maybe take a page from the artists and athletes, try to convince ourselves that every moment is a balancing of fate, that our keyboard taps are made of fateful ripples. But that’s only one ingredient, and it can only go so far. How can sensory breadth, intuition, and open awareness be made functionally necessary to spreadsheets, or slide decks, or lines of code?

Wayfinders go days without sleep, they hold themselves taut to the sounds of the waves against the ship, the position of the stars, a mental image of their destination… You don’t do things like that out of a sense of pretend — you have to know deep down that you have no choice but metis. Even artists get to pass out after a couple nights or ditch their work that isn’t going well, fate of the world-soul be damned. Deep down they know, they know they can ignore the threat if they want to. The ocean god won’t actually drag them to the deep.

You feel it don’t you? The yearning. Metis was made for us and we were made for metis. It’s a human birthright to melt into the world while exerting the peak of our abilities. The gorgeous nearly mystical blend of raw individual competence and total dissolution into the Current.

But what could wake us up to metis? What gods are left, what forces are we still capable of noticing our asymmetrical relationship to? What dynamic environments can we thrust ourselves into, with a blend of practical knowledge and daring If we’ve gotten used to seeing ourselves as above nature, before what can we shrink in awe, while a wily voice inside us straightens up and says “I got this”?

To me, at least one answer stands out clearly—

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1

There’s something else here, something I’m partially missing and partially just can’t express yet. All of this “excellence requires tension” talk would seem to back up the screaming high school football coaches and “I eat stress for breakfast” finance bros of the world, but only on the surface. What that mindset pushes for isn’t metis. My sense here is that the distinction has to do with both the robustness of one’s emotional life, and with what I might point at with the phrase “left hemisphere tension vs right hemisphere tension.” You can’t find metis if you and your culture are emotionally messed in big ways, there’s too much mess and gunk in the system for the dynamic responsiveness metis needs. And you can’t find metis if the tension you’re moving into is narrow, one-dimensional, disconnected from most of your being. If you don’t have open sensory awareness and a large field of open flowing awareness, the tension you build won’t have the generative, dynamic quality needed for metis (and also needed for most forms of generative living).