Today's
quotation:
If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have
a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go
into business, because we'd be
cynical. Well, that's
nonsense. You've got
to jump off cliffs all the time and
build
your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury
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Today's
Meditation:
Risk:
how good we become at avoiding it! Our intellects
are pretty strong, and most of us live in cultures that
value intellect over intuition, knowledge over
feelings. We grow up learning to rationalize and to
explain things away, and our lives become pretty risk-free
the more we learn to come up with reasons for which a
particular course of action simply won't work for us.
People
can hurt us, and many people don't have deep relationships
because they've convinced themselves that everybody will
hurt them. They want to avoid the pain. Well,
the bad news is that the ecstasy and the agony co-exist in
our lives, and we never can feel the wonderful results of
having taken a risk and changed our lives if we haven't
also felt the pain of having taken a risk and changed our
lives. The good news is that we can deal with the
pain-- we're extremely resilient beings if we give
ourselves the chance to be.
The
bad news, though, is that we often focus so much on
avoidance that our wings never get developed. They
sit there, useless, because we've never spread them in an
effort to fly. But they're just like every other
muscle in our bodies-- they have to be exercised, used, in
order to be of use to us. Most of us use our
intellects and think that if we jump off a cliff we'll
die. We rarely think about what will happen to us in
the long run if we don't jump off any cliffs at all.
Our
intellect tends to support our fears. Our feelings
tend to support our intuition, and it would be wise of us
to use these aspects of ourselves in balance. We may
have grown up to believe in the supremacy of the
intellect, but when we use it to limit ourselves, it's
simply a very powerful weapon that we use to limit our own
lives.
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