Emotional maturity is key.
A lot of us have the intellectual piece down. So many of us identify as intellectuals, scholars, thinkers. We study and observe and analyze, all with the awareness that we are never done learning and unlearning in this life. But I'm not as concerned about the intellectual piece. Using intellect we've identified and named the colonial practices and institutions that economically and psychologically enslave the masses of humans. We've named them many times. We've nuanced them. We understand them intellectually.
What it will take and what it has always taken historically to combat them is sound emotional maturity. Emotional maturity is the ability to understand and manage your emotions. Emotional maturity means knowing when and how to conserve your energy for worthy battles. It means knowing where to direct your valid rage. It means being able to combat your ego and communicate with people with whom you disagree, with people who are unlike you. It means knowing that everything that you expose yourself to will culminate to form what you are -- including your *food and your television shows and that toxic person you keep around because it's more comfortable and familiar to be in a toxic engagement than it is to be alone (because that would mean that you would have to finally deal with yourself and figure out why you're not happy with yourself, IN yourself). It means taking accountability for the ways you may have contributed to an undesirable outcome. It means telling yourself the radically uncomfortable truth.
We are more concerned with being smart and right than enlightened and evolved. Smart will only take us so far. Smart has only taken us so far. We must be both intelligent AND emotionally strategic.
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