Slow Havamal: 10

[kylec]

In the tenth verse, wisdom is described as the best burden a traveler can carry. It will prove useful in new places, and grants comfort to the poor.

The fact that wisdom is referred to as a burden is another of Havamal’s jokes, I think. Later in the poem it’ll be spoken of as something that doesn’t necessarily bring joy. But for now, the metaphor of the burden compares it to the physical belongings of the traveler. Nothing he can pack, in any quantity, will exceed the value of the wisdom he carries with him. I’ve already defined wisdom as a structure of experiences and their relationships. It provides context for our situation. No matter how little wisdom we have, we will always use it to fit the current situation to a narrative and make judgments and decisions about it. The quality of those judgments and decisions improve with the quality of our wisdom.

A traveler can expect to encounter novel places and situations. There will not be an exact formula for how to handle them. But with sufficient wisdom, new experiences can be related to old ones, and he can hazard a guess. He may not know this particular bad area of town he’s wandered into, but he’s been in rough neighborhoods before and has a general idea of how to handle it. Again, this is spotting a relationship of context between something he faces today, and something he’s faced before. Even if he doesn’t know what to do, past mistakes should at least have taught him a few things not to do. A gun might be a helpful burden to carry into a bad neighborhood, but wisdom could steer him clear of any situation in which he might need a gun to begin with.

It is better than money. Money is a token of stored energy. It has no intrinsic value, but people will accept it in exchange for their labor, for food, gasoline, a place to sleep, because they can later exchange it for the same. All goods require energy to produce, and either store it to pass on, like food, or spare it, like an axe for chopping wood. Labor is energy, itself. Something’s value in money tends to relate to how much and what kind of stored energy it is, as well as its availability. None of that is in the verse, but it’s important to understand how money functions to glean why wisdom might be more valuable in an unfamiliar place.

Wisdom provides the context for directing our own energy. A wise traveler won’t waste energy on useless tasks, or cost himself by bringing himself to harm. He needs less energy than a fool—and less money—to accomplish the same things. Just about anything can be done with the brute force of a massive supply of energy (or money). But that’s not always available to us. Not when we’re traveling fast and light. There are even some situations in which money has no value at all. If the thing you want to buy is essential and scarce, no one will be willing to part with it at any price. What do you do, then? Wisdom may offer a clue to alleviate or avoid this situation.

If you asked a group of poor people which they would rather have more of—money, or wisdom—you’d probably hear a preference for the former. According to Havamal, that would be a mistake. What good is money if it’s wasted? I recognize that poverty is sometimes unavoidable. We have no control over our circumstances of birth. But a great many people remain poor over the course of their lives, even over generations, due to their own unconscious choices. They don’t marshal and direct their resources well. A healthy supply of wisdom would allow them to earn their way to better conditions, picking up valuable lessons along the way that further add to their pool. And anyone can earn wisdom. It only requires experience, and reflection. Not true of money. Wisdom can never be lost or stolen, though it can fall into disuse. Money is the immediate gratification, but wisdom can earn money later, and allows for a higher ceiling in terms of accomplishments.

What is this road, anyway? It’s always tempting to stop at the literal interpretation of the poem. A traveler physically moving through strange lands. But each of us, whether we roam or not, is moving through a series of experiences we call life. We have a finite amount of energy and time. How we direct it determines what we get out of life. Every action piles up some sort of experience, and if we probe them for the lesson we can save ourselves quite a bit of pain. It’s important to make sure those experiences lead to actual wisdom, and not the foolish delusion of it. Real wisdom is the map that corresponds to the territory in a way that is reasonably predictable. It gets us about where we expect to go. To court the real deal, we must always be willing to learn from our successes and our mistakes. The traveler has to compare the results of today’s actions with yesterday’s, and make adjustments tomorrow. The burden, says Odin, is worth it.