Finding Wisdoms By Cultural Mining

Each culture has embedded within it some features that make it distinct.

A range of customs, social behaviors and values that differentiates it from other cultures, providing a unique perspective on how life is best lived.

Cultures tend to emerge around central themes or ideas that are adopted by the collective and this has been the case for millennia.

We have hidden in each culture, an archive of knowledge, mapping the human experience across a vast expanse of geography and time.

Walking, talking, living encyclopedias

Profound wisdoms and lessons to be learnt, which are still as relevant today as they were thousands of years ago.

Cultural mining is the process of extracting these wisdoms (or ideas) from the raw ore of culture.

In this sense, life itself has much to teach you, if only you are silent for long enough to listen and look closely enough to see.

The world is expansive, with a multitude of cultures and subcultures, age-old rituals and traditions, with each carrying within it a lesson that can change your life in the simplest yet most profound ways.

But this is where I see things a little differently.

Where the world is increasingly obsessed with diversity, I  am much more fascinated with what we all share in common.

What are those threads that tie us all together, that makes us fundamentally human?

These answers are not found in books, nor on the Internet – but only through your lived experience.

In bridging the gap between knowledge and wisdom, between knowing and understanding.

In seeing the world as it really is;

And facing up to some universal truths, 

Those things that have remained unchanged across cultures and across time