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Today's
quotation:
Wise
people are able to give themselves gracefully to seemingly
contradictory experiences, because they know that they belong to
different seasons of life, all of which are necessary to the whole.
Spring and winter, growth and decay, creativity and fallowness,
health and sickness, power and impotence, and life and death
all belong within the economy of being.
Sam Keen
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Today's
Meditation:
If we seek wisdom instead of information, we risk
being left behind by others who have been seduced into
believing that information is the most important aspect of
our lives. Those who seek wisdom, though, learn very
quickly not just that knowing a lot of information is
empty knowledge, but that learning from wise people helps
us to navigate the world in peace and calm and balance,
rather than constantly facing frustration and even anger
as the world around us changes and shifts and evolves,
making information obsolete. Wisdom, though, cannot
grow obsolete.
Learning to be wise helps us to face life head-on without
fear or nervousness because the wise person knows that
life can't be controlled. Yes, we try to control it,
and to a certain extent we're able to do so-- we even build
walls to keep the ocean's waves at bay-- but most of what
we see as "control" is merely illusion.
And that's how it should be-- the wise person recognizes
that life goes on, and it will go on on its own terms, not
on ours. It follows its cycles, and it would do us
good to follow those cycles, also.
I love blueberries, but I learned something when I read in
Thoreau's Walden about letting things happen in
their season. In the summer, I enjoy blueberries,
but I tend not to eat the imported ones in the winter because of
that reading. Now I have them only when they're in
season here, and they taste so much better because of the
many months that I don't eat them. When I was in
college and when I was a young teacher, I was able to
relate to my students on a different level. Now that
I'm older, though, my relationship to them has changed, as
has my role-- now it's much more appropriate for me to see
myself as a mentor rather than a peer, and trying to keep
that old relationship would make me completely
ineffective.
By growing wise (something I'm still working on, and will
be until the day I die), I give myself the chance to
experience life rather than trying to control it; to go
with the flow rather than stopping it; to experience the
cycles of life and see just how I fit in with
them. Let's seek wisdom instead of information so
that we can live richer lives and then pass that wisdom on
to others who also wish to live richly and deeply.
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