The Value of Being Awake

The greatest intelligence of them all.

Toward the top of the modern hierarchy of valued traits sits intelligence—a quality hardly anybody, especially the so-called intelligent, understands.

Mainly, we don’t understand intelligence because it appears in more guises than we commonly or even scientifically recognize, from familiar abilities like mathematics to lesser-known capacities such as “economy of movement”—the ability of a server, say, to always have something in their hands, which can be a beautiful thing to watch. For my part, I’m decent at math and quite athletic, but have poor motor skills and am always leaving rooms having forgotten why I entered them.

But it makes sense that we value intelligence despite having a threadbare understanding of it. In earlier ages, people valued strong or dexterous hands for plowing or knitting, or sharp eyesight for tracking game across the savannah. But we live in an increasingly disembodied world, where advantage lies primarily between our ears and between each other.

Yet we seem content, for the most part, to equate intelligence with children getting good grades or adults making a lot of money. If anything, we seem more interested in denying someone’s stupidity than in exploring their aptitude.

“He’s a smart kid; he just has trouble focusing.”

“She’s not dumb; she’s neurodivergent.”

Even if we broadened our understanding of intelligence and shifted some of our focus from deficiency to strength, we would still be missing the bigger picture, the purpose to which intelligence is put. In other words, there is a form of intelligence that stands above all others, which anyone can access—that of being awake. To be awake is to be correctly oriented to what matters most in a moment.

For the bulk of human history, this likely depended on one’s powers of perception. As Thoreau writes in Walden:

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.

Walden, Thoreau claims, is an attempt to wake his neighbors up.

Whatever fog Henry hoped to clear for his neighbors has only thickened in the modern world, so that today, being awake might depend less on perception and more on the ability to resist distraction. Sit on a bench the next time you have nothing to do—which may be years from now—and spend fifteen minutes watching people go by. You’ll see the sort of thing this cartoon caricatures:

To most moments, the average modern person brings not the dramatic emotional baggage of TV shows and books—some trauma erupting into the present—but a more ordinary kind of clutter, which they drag behind them like cans on a newlyweds’ car.

You can see it mostly in their eyes: a kind of huddled franticness, a worry pressing in. They have too much to do, too much on their mind, and are already behind. Meanwhile, one of the greatest compliments I ever received came from a friend’s dad, who asked me, after I’d been living in New York for six months, if it was my first time there.

“No,” I said. “I live here. Why?”

“Oh,” he shrugged. “It’s just that you look up at the buildings.”

We have many colloquialisms for this tendency to lose sight of what matters: “missing the forest for the trees,” “missing the bigger picture,” “putting the cart before the horse,” “taking your eye off the ball.” An enormous amount of senseless bullshit arises from the ability of individuals, and especially groups, to bypass what is most salient in a moment, opportunity, or task.

One example is a voicemail I encountered about a year ago at my orthopedic’s office. It offered several prompts, but “file a workers’ comp claim” came before “schedule an appointment.” Now, there may be reasons for this—some behind-the-scenes logic that justifies the order. Even so, allowing that to stand as a valid explanation misses the central point that the customer experience should be paramount. Indeed, by a steady application of this principle, Amazon has nearly taken over the world.

In another example, a colleague once asked me, when I inquired about her availability, whether the client I was hoping to refer would be interested in bodywork. “I’m just really into that right now and want to work with clients who are, too.” I was confused: I thought the point of therapy was to help the client, rather than gratify the therapist.

“It’s not about you!” I wanted to scream.

With each passing day, I believe this more strongly: every other form of intelligence is subordinate to a person’s ability to arrive fully in the moment, unencumbered by distraction. Yet this sits uneasily with our usual understanding of what it means to be smart. It may sound as though I’m saying the smartest people are simply those with the least to do. Am I equating intelligence with simplicity?

To an extent, yes. On the one hand, simplicity in life—just as in thought, craft, or strategy—is a form of intelligence. As Thoreau says, “My greatest skill was wanting but little.” On the other, a person whose intelligence is compromised by distraction, stress, fatigue, or overwork, is not intelligent. The best ability is availability.

We Americans have little appreciation, or even patience, for this perspective. We tend to value activity over impact, movement over direction, noise over music. Think about how we treat our best and brightest students: we doom them to a life of biting off more than they can chew. We bury them in busyness. We break their backs with books (or more recently their eyes with articles). We train them, above all, to keep appearing impressive.

Somewhere along the way, the forest is lost for the trees—and these poor students, for all their intelligence, rarely find a way out. This may explain why some of the “smartest” people I have met are also the dumbest, in the sense of being least attuned to what is around them. I sometimes wonder if the only ones with a chance are the mediocre students, who have the opportunity to do a few things well because they are not pressured to do more.

I think back to my classmates in high school. Some of them had an easier time with quadratic equations. Some were better at hearing iambic pentameter. Nobody was better at badminton. I envied some of their facility with foreign languages.

In the last twenty years, what difference have these differences made? I ask as one who has recently become a dad, and wants to teach his daughter something. But I have to conclude: probably none.

We spend so much of our lives trying to become more intelligent—more knowledgeable, more capable, more impressive. And yet the difference between people rarely seems to come down to how much they know, but to whether they are there to use it. Yeah, there is only one capacity, quality, practice, or skill in life that unlocks all others. When I bump into someone—when I shake their hand—are they awake?

Are they alive?

“To affect the quality of the day,” Thoreau writes, “that is the highest of arts.” I can always tell when I am in the presence of someone who is present, awake to what the moment either needs or affords. One need not be overbearing or Romantic about it. A few of my friends come to mind: people for whom no circumstance can derail a bird’s-eye view of the miracle they are living.

That is what I would like to preach—and so that is what I must continue to practice. To be awake is the first and final thing that matters.