I've been thinking even more about where I’m smart and where I’m not so smart.

Even though I read Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences when it was published in 1983, I’d never actually done a survey of myself across his nine categories. The process has been very illuminating. I see myself now in particular ways, not just as an undifferentiated self who is smart (or not). It’s a relief to acknowledge where I’m not very smart - it’s a form of self-knowledge I’ve been reluctant to own because I didn’t want to look too closely at my limitations. It’s been equally satisfying to acknowledge the categories of intelligence where I am strong and claim them as gifts I can share.

Last time, I wrote about my personal experiences with four of the nine forms of intelligence; this time, I want to explore the remaining five.

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Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence: ability to control one’s body movements and to handle objects skillfully

I was the fastest runner in every one of my elementary school classes, which gave me great pride in my athletic ability. But as I grew suddenly taller in junior high and peaked out at 6’4” in high school, my speed decreased in proportion to my increasing height. By my mid-twenties I’d settled in at nearly 200 pounds and have argued with my weight since then. I lost more speed and was never able to retrieve the grace with which my body moved as a young boy. I was slow and ponderous.

My physical image of myself has always been tied to athletics. At moments when I excelled athletically, I felt particularly good about who I was. My excellence, or lack thereof, is always tied to competition; I measure my accomplishments against those of the best athletes I compete against. Since I was fourteen years old, I’ve seldom come out near the top. Because I was no better than average overall, I’ve been disappointed in my body most of my adult life.

Despite my loss of lithe physical grace, I worked hard to develop enough skill to be captain of my high school basketball team, though I wasn’t good enough to play for my college team. I learned to play tennis in my thirties and had hopes to learn this new sport and to be noticeably good at it, to imagine that I could in fact become an excellent player. After all, I’d been a standout athlete as a boy, so why not as an adult? It took many decades to realize this was not going to happen; no matter how many lessons I took or how many matches I played, I was never going to be better than an average tennis player.

I’ve witnessed grace and gliding. I watched Ginger Rogers dance every step with Fred Astaire but do it backwards in high heels, saw Willy Mays make that catch in center field in the 1954 World Series, envied Roger Federer’s backhand and the way Shohei Ohtani hits fastballs.

I think of my body now as too big to be graceful, too ponderous to glide. I’m now an old white man who never learned to dance. When it comes to bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, I can recognize greatness when I see it, but I’m a lifelong C student.

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Spatial-Visual Intelligence: capacity to think in images and pictures, to visualize accurately and abstractly

On one vacation in my early thirties, I decided to spend time drawing, something I’d never done before (nor since). I recently found the thin folder full of these efforts and was quite impressed with my skills. I reproduced faces and bodies from magazine articles or paintings, and they look like the subjects. But what I was doing was copying, not creating. It’s as if I was looking, but not imagining. What I know I cannot do is sit in front of a blank piece of paper or a canvas and bring to life something brand new. The imagination that flares up in me around speaking and writing seems inaccessible to creating pictures.

I don’t think in pictures. I think in words, in language, and about conversations, but not in imagery. I remember all my dreams, but not what they look like - if indeed they look like anything. Even when I wake and think I know who I was dreaming about I cannot picture them. I remember the feelings and the words and the exchanges. This is true for me when I read as well. I’m locked on the interactions between the characters, not on what they look like or their surroundings, however beautifully the writer describes them.

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Musical Intelligence: ability to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch and timber

I fell asleep last night, as I do several nights a week, with the lyrics of the final stanza of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah drifting through my mind:

And even if it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of song
With nothing on my lips but Hallelujah.

When I woke up this morning, the opening lines of the same song drifted in, as they often do:

They say there was a special chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya.

I don’t get it. It’s not my favorite song; I don’t keep it on my playlist. Yes, I’ve heard versions of this song probably hundreds of times, but still cannot explain why it cycles through my mind multiple times a week.

I cannot read music, I’ve never sung in a choir as my wife has all her life, nor played an instrument like our sons have.

The distinction that makes the most sense of my relationship to music is this: I have very little intellectual connection to it; I don’t think much about music, whether it’s classic rock, folk rock, grunge rock, whether it’s The Rolling Stones or Lady Gaga, Miles Davis or John Coltrane, Mahler or Beethoven. Music lives in my soul, not in my head: I don’t know if that makes me musically intelligent or musically ignorant. Music inspires me, comforts me, pleasures me. It puts me to sleep at bedtime and wakes me in the morning.

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Naturalist Intelligence: Ability to recognize and categorize plants, animals and other objects in nature

I’d be lost if someone dropped me in the woods or asked me to cultivate a garden or organize a gathering of animals. We had dogs and cats because we had kids, but I’m not a pet person. When we put down our last cat (our final pet) fifteen years ago, I suggested to my wife that our next “pet” should be a geranium. We’ve kept the promise.

I have a lifelong love affair with the calming rhythm of the sea when I sit in the sand and listen to the surf. (I sit under an umbrella now after decades of skin cancers from my childhood and teen years slathered in Baby oil or Cocoa butter to deep fry my summer tan.) I’m full of wonder while driving through a forest or across a span of desert. While I certainly appreciate the serenity or beauty of the natural world, it doesn’t call to me. I am more or less an indoor cat.

If truth be told, I don’t care enough to devote time to learn about plants or animals or the rest of nature. I have a profound lack of curiosity about the natural world. Please don’t tell our grandson whose major in college is environmental chemistry.

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Existential Intelligence: Sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence such as, What is the meaning of life? Why do we die? How did we get here?

If there are three pillars of my intelligences, then unquestionably this is one. Like my verbal-linguistic and interpersonal strengths, I can trace this predilection back to early and formative experiences. Perhaps I have always had an inclination to curiosity about bigger questions, but the purpose and direction I found in the church as a young person amplified, refined, and cemented those traits.

People who are genuinely existentially intelligent are curious, and uncertain. Religious people who lack curiosity are defined more by their absence of questioning: a type of God said it, I believe it, that settles it certainty about the universe and our place in it.

But that’s never been me. I floated through childhood and adolescence with minimal, manageable suffering. But beginning in my twenties, death knocked the breath out of me and never stopped. Now in my mid-eighties and conscious that my own death is not too far into my future, I still think and write and talk about what life means and acknowledge the unanswerable questions death poses to each of us. One sign of my continuing death-related PTSD is that I keep revisiting earlier tragedies in my mind with the same regularity that I visit our son’s niche in the columbarium in the tower of our church. These deaths are unfinished emotional and spiritual events for me.

I grew up with a faith that promised to help me make sense out of such inexplicable losses. But my faith and my community have never been able to explain such tragedies and have done nothing at all to protect me and others from their recurrence. Why do I keep seeking such explanations? Maybe I still want to believe that we’re not left by ourselves to manage a universe void of meaning, that there is love at the center of creation that wishes and works for our safety and comfort.