Itutu🧘🏽‍♂️

Hey friends,

Something admirable that I came across a while back. It’s mostly quoted, so I hope you learn a thing or two:

If you remember your Social Studies and History class well, the Yoruba people are an ethnic group of ~18 million, spread between Nigeria and Benin. For the Yoruba, one of the most flattering ways to describe a person is to say they have much ‘itutu.’

Wikipedia - Itutu, is a Yoruba word that is translatable as “cool” and has been used to describe the aesthetic that characterizes much of the Yoruba. An Itutu aesthetic includes the appearance of physical or sexual beauty whilst having a humble, calm, collected face that is found in much Yoruba sculpture.

The word denotes a particular approach to life:  unhurried, composed, assured and unflappable.

If a bus is late, a person of ‘itutu’ won’t shout or get in a dispute with the ticket vendor, they’ll let out a minor sigh and pull a weary smile.
If it starts pouring just when they’ve laid chairs out for an event, they will - in their normal tranquil and unaffected way - simply take them all back in again.

There isn’t much that should rattle a person of ‘itutu.’ Important to note also, ‘itutu’ isn’t any sort of divine gift or trait left for a peculiar people. It’s a quality that can be cultivated and is the outcome of having absorbed a particular view of how existence works.

For the Yoruba, agitation and anger flow from a mistaken and over-ambitious sense of what it lies in our power to change. It is when we believe that we are more in command of external reality than we actually are, that we respond to reversals and frustrations with rage.

The calm person of ‘itutu’ may be every bit as sad as their hysterical counterpart about the delayed bus or the sudden rain, but what underpins their composure is a sense that trouble must be accepted as belonging to the order of things.

In their reserved manner, a person of ‘itutu’ displays a grasp of another key term in Yoruba philosophy: ‘àṣẹ’ which we might translate as destiny, existence, or the cosmic order. What lies in the province of ‘àṣẹ’ can’t be altered by any human will, but an enlightened person should understand the direction of ‘àṣẹ’ and then adjust their desires and ambitions accordingly.

There is an important final detail here: ‘itutu’ doesn’t only render a person wise. It additionally makes them attractive, including physically attractive, and what we might call ‘cool’ - which is why any self-respecting young Yoruba would strive hard to adopt its outward signs.

For the Yoruba, agitation isn’t merely an offence to a proper understanding of the universe; it’s also just horribly unfashionable.

It is immensely attractive to be calm in the face of adversity, and to be one who understands how the universe works in order to avoid rather unnecessary anger or agitation.

✍🏽Quote of the Week

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PS: If you have a few seconds to spare, please hit the <reply> button and let me know what you thought of this email. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it and what could be improved. It also reminds me that there’s another person reading it on the other end of my screen😅. Thanks.

Have a wonderful week ahead!

✍🏽Reagan.