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Today's
quotation:
Wisdom is not book learning but, rather, a quality
or state of knowing
what is true or right coupled with the judgment to discern
constructive action. Wisdom is the insight and intuition
contained in the
proverbial still, small voice that only a quiet mind can hear and
know.
Sue Patton Thoele
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Today's
Meditation:
When we live
in a world in which simple information is considered to be
the most important aspect of our lives, wisdom can be
rather difficult to find, much less develop. We face
a constant battle against this need to know
information, versus our desire to be truly wise, to be
able to discern truth from untruth, valuable from useless,
relevant from irrelevant.
If we
want to develop wisdom, then we need to pull ourselves
away from the constant onslaught of pieces of information
masquerading as important. In our world of today
people want to quantify everything, count everything,
"know" everything. But the truly wise
person recognizes that any information that's relevant and
important today will be irrelevant and unimportant
tomorrow when we start a new task. Rather than allow
ourselves to be inundated with a million pieces of
disparate information, we need to find quiet time to
process what we do know and come to terms with that voice
inside that is our wisdom.
I can
learn a lot from books. I can learn names and dates
and equations and vocabulary and rules. But my
wisdom comes from taking the time to process what goes
into my mind, to allow it to settle and then to examine it
to figure out if it truly makes sense in my life. I
read lots of material about the importance of focusing a
lot of time and effort on my finances, for example, and
while I know that they're important, I also know that on
the day I die I'll look back with more satisfaction on the
time I spent being with others and helping them than on
the times I spent making and managing money. Someone
who works with finances and helps other people with theirs
probably will see this dynamic in completely different
ways, of course, but their wisdom isn't necessarily my
wisdom.
Let's
not be fooled by information masquerading as wisdom.
Let's make sure that we know what we know and how it
applies to our lives and the lives of those we affect in
any way. When I gain my wisdom and do my best to
expand and strengthen it, there really is no telling just
how beneficial I can be to others because of what I've
learned.
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