https://www.willbuckingham.com/tags/ideas/Recent content in Ideas on Will BuckinghamHugoen-GBTue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.willbuckingham.com/choosing-well-01/Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://www.willbuckingham.com/choosing-well-01/<p><em>This essay is republished/archived from</em> <a href="https://wayward.willbuckingham.com"><em>Wayward Things,</em></a> <em>my very occasional substack newsletter. It is the first in a two part series, exploring how divination—although seemingly weird—might nevertheless constitute an art of choosing well, and may offer a productive means of navigating our way through what philosopher Ruth Chang calls ‘hard choices.’</em></p> <h2 id="a-busy-weekend-in-the-temple">A Busy Weekend in the Temple</h2> <p>If you go to any reasonable-sized Taiwanese temple at the weekend, you will see crowds of people kneeling before the shrines of the gods, asking for advice on the most pressing problems in their lives. There, in the incense-steeped half-light of the temple—among the gold leaf, the elaborate carvings, and the paintings—temple visitors throw small, red-coloured, croissant-shaped blocks of wood called <em>poe</em>. They ask questions about the big choices they face: whom to marry, which job to choose, whether to move overseas, or what to do with their troublesome relatives. The wooden blocks clatter to the ground, and on the basis of how the blocks fall, the gods provide answers to life’s most burning questions.</p>