Our secret knowledge @work

Yesterday I was reminded of an Irish poet, and also of another poet who died three years before the other was born. I was explaining something to a young colleague at the brewery as we were doing Friday morning kegging at two different stations…beer on the one and root beer on the other. 

We all have accumulated secret knowledge which just comes along as we live our lives and try to do our work. It’s our experience and knowledge that allows us to appreciate nuances and predict an outcome. Nothing extraordinary about it. This week I was faced with a decision, and I saw that what I determined surprised others who were relatively recent entrants into the world of professional brewing and who were watching me as the situation unfolded. I had to think about a process in real time, and was comfortable with what I decided. And then I made another decision later when data changed. I am sure that in their futures, the young professionals will allow the paradigm of rigor and correction to be influenced by what they have learned in the years up to that point. That’s human nature. We start with knowing a relationship between cause and effect that is very close, and as our careers move along we gain experiences that lend a broader perspective. 

The end of my academic career in 1994 coincided with my inconsequential departure from my lovely college, and at the same time, the notable departure of a scholar and poet who wrote, 

“The true and durable path into and through experience involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”

 And one year after he left, Seamus Heaney accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. During our overlapping time in the same halls, I enjoyed a dinner, and then we all retreated to a very comfortable suite and I had a cup of tea with the man from Northern Ireland, and a whiskey after. He was a Fellow at the college, and some students referred to him as ‘Famous Seamus’. We conversed a little about brewing, my ongoing research, and New Hampshire and Eagle Pond in winter and his poem “Iron Spike’ …. this was the only invite extended to me to dine at High Table while I was there; he was my neighbor at dinner. I honestly only knew that poem of his because I had read it on a signed print framed up a in the suite where postgrads relaxed with a beer or coffee down the hall in the evenings. (I have read much more Heaney since then).

I think that what drives us to gain our individual secret knowledge is the satisfaction of working. We find value and meaning within our lives with the work we do…at least that’s how my parents wired me, and it clearly worked for them. 

For me, Rudyard Kipling’s framing of the personal worth of industriousness is found with the two who face a lengthy and long-abandoned hedge row in the countryside- they expend a couple of hours working to get an understanding of the time it will require so they can quote the farmer their cost for the needed work to be performed:

https://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/DiversityOfCreatures/friendlybrook.html

It’s nice to be here, and spend some time with the team. If I serve well, their paths of expanding on their own secret knowledge will be augmented with me working alongside them. I hope that’s one outcome.