This is FiveMinuteFriday, episode number 254, Two Wolves.
Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, ladies and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on the show today. And today I’d like to share a story with you, a story which I heard while doing my meditation exercises through the Calm app. And this story is about two wolves. So sometimes they share these stories and they’re interesting and useful, insightful. However this one actually stuck with me and I’ve been pondering it for about a week and I’ve been very excited to record this, to share this with you. So it’s actually quite a well known story and it goes like this.
So an old man was sitting down with his grandson and the old man told the grandson that “a fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil, he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.”
And then the old man continued. “The other is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. The same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person too.” So the grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather which wolf will win. To which the old men simply replied, the one you feed.
So very, very deep story. If, if you ask my opinion. And what actually talks about is the internal battle that we always have, that we have positive and negative emotions and that ultimately it is in our hands, which one prevails within us. And we’ve already talked about emotions on the podcast before, and of course they are important. Of course, being analytical and using our mind is important, especially in our profession, profession as data scientists. However, emotions really also have a massive impact and often actually govern what we think about and govern how we act and behave in lives and what we do in lives.
And so we’ve talked about emotions before and we have talked about that it is important to acknowledge all aspects of ourselves. So this story is not saying that we should completely ignore feelings of anxiety or anger or guilt and resentment and false pride and things like that. It’s not that we should completely ignore them. We definitely need to acknowledge them. And we’ve talked about ways on how that can be done effectively on previous episodes of the podcast. However, at the same time as acknowledging all emotions, whether they’re negative such as guilt and anger or positive, such as love and joy, we should at the same time, once we’ve acknowledged them, it’s up to us to choose which emotions and qualities we want to nurture, which of them we want to focus on and which of them we want to allow to grow. And in fact, which of them we want to feed.
And in this case, feeding emotions is pondering on them, thinking on them, thinking about them, letting them overwhelm us, letting them take over us. And so if you think about it that way, it’s, it’s very exciting. It’s very, very different to just saying that, you know, like I feel a certain way and that’s it. No, it’s acknowledging how you feel in a certain point. But then deciding what feeling, what wolf are you going to actually feed inside you. And so I guess a great exercise for this weekend if you’re up for it, is to catch those moments when you’re either feeling negative emotions or you’re feeling positive emotions and allowing them to come into you and actually feeling through them, acknowledging them. But then at the same time deciding which ones are you going to feed?
Well I guess the step in between, there’s first to find out how are you feeding your emotions, like catching yourself, pondering on negative emotions or positive emotions and see what are those internal techniques, internal methods that you have inside you that, through which you are feeding those emotions. And once you’d know them, then apply them to the right wolf. Which wolf do you want to feed? The good one or the bad one?
And on that note, I hope that was an insightful story and maybe it’ll help you somehow for this weekend or sometime in the future. And I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
