A wise person, according to Sam Keen, the author of Fire in the Belly, is one who knows what time it is in his or her life; that is, they have a sense of the appropriate which enables them to know what to do amid a baffling array of options. Keen tells of going one summer to visit relatives who lived in the tidewater area of Virginia, where there are many little bays adjoining the Atlantic Ocean. Some of the old-timers there warned him about the peculiar dangers of swimming in that area, particularly at those times of the day when the tide was coming in or going out. They advised him that if he found himself caught in either of those periods of turbulence, the thing to do was not to try to swim against the current, for that would be impossible, but rather simply to float and allow the tide…