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Today's
Quotation:
Human beings are human beings before
they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or
manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible
human beings, they will make themselves capable and sensible
lawyers or physicians.
John Stuart Mill
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Today's
Meditation:
Sometimes
we seem to forget the basics, the idea of building a strong
base before we build anything else. Overall, we're not
a society of base-builders any more. Rather, we tend
to want people to become something very quickly, and in many
situations we're impatient with and intolerant of processes
that don't seem to be contributing directly to an immediate
goal.
When
I coach basketball, most of the players want to spend most
of their time shooting. They all want to be scorers,
and they all want to score a lot of points. They often
don't see the value of spending practice time working on
dribbling and passing and ball handling, so they end up with
poor
skills in all of those fields. This leads to many turnovers
during games, and inevitably to losing games. Those
who do learn those skills hold on to the ball and are much
more likely to create opportunities for scoring.
Life's
like that. We don't run before we can walk, and we
don't walk before we can crawl. But crawling allows us
to develop motor skills that will help us to walk, and
months of practicing our walking allow us to start
running. Likewise, years of teaching young people
important lessons about morality and compassion and love and
empathy and money management and trustworthiness can help
that person to shine when he or she reaches the stage of
being a professional. Those are the traits that will
set him or her apart when people get to know them as human
beings, not just as doctors or lawyers or police officers or
administrative assistants.
Having
a strong base also will provide these people with the
fundamental qualities that can help them to recognize and
feel happiness in their lives, which is possibly one of the
best gifts we can give to anyone. People need patience
to develop themselves, but we also need patience to teach
them as they develop. Our patience can help them to
become the people they were meant to be.
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