Feel

You can't just logically induce virtue.

The life of virtue is one of feel. Van Neistat puts this wonderfully.

When do we shift? When it feels right. How much clutch? Just gotta feel it. No way to adequately put it into words, and that’s what pisses people off / frightens them when you try to teach it.

[Driving stick] is an exercise that refines not our thoughts, but our feel.

This video amuses me greatly. Any time my Dad has taught me to drive something, it goes about as well as Van teaching his wife to drive. You just can’t explain these things.

Engineer-brain hates this, but engineer-brain has to be quieted sometimes. Even if you were told that you should push the brake pedal with 20 pounds of force, could you do that? No, you need to feel. Feel doesn’t apply to just emotions. Feel applies to cold hard rational things too. Maybe you’d call it intuition. Heuristics. Design needs this otherwise it stares at requirements documents and cannot begin the work at hand.

Feel often needs “failure”. Failure forms feel.

This is something we can get confused about a lot in the spiritual life too, it seems. No, God can’t really tell you what you need to do sometimes. You have to experience - and perhaps fail - and then assess. Life, like design, is iterative.

Logic and education is sand when compared to experience.

This isn’t to totally forsake education. After all, we make concrete with sand. But concrete isn’t just sand - it’s an aggregate of many things. Things which are mixed and cured in the hot sun of lived experience.

True virtue concretizes. It becomes real - tangible - set.