TODAY'S QUOTE: Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), The Infernal Marriage (1834)
Learning how to behave at any given moment in any situation requires knowledge that we often don't even bother obtaining. If we don't learn to view the big picture from a depth inside ourselves that we don't even know exists how can we possibly pretend to know enough? By standing too long and hard upon a, "I know it all" platform a mind never has the chance to expand, since any notion not already possessed is made somehow counterfeit. Chances get missed... hope gets misplaced... bad choices lock us up into prisons of our own construction, and keep us there under false pretenses. It's impossible to learn that we possess the only key to our true quality of life when nobody or nothing can teach us shit!
Some of us are most unwilling students once we imagine that the finish line has been crossed. And each of us seem to have a different point where we're instantly transformed from student to mastermind. Once the ego inspired among us aren't required by law or pressured by parents they enter the rat race and consider themselves fully grown and in charge. Dreams of grandeur are an ego's blueprint to a lifestyle most never achieve. Their heads stay stuck in the glory days and they truly expect the stasis quo to automatically continue. An ego's sense of entitlement can be gigantic; without the drive to do the work to become true master of any dream all we're left with is a nightmare that haunts night and day. We must be willing to unpucker our ego if we want to truly view and retain the treasures of wisdom that are our successes and failures true rewards. We have to continue learning about life inside and out or we miss the point altogether.
Higher education, of a certain sort, isn't enclosed inside of brick buildings. Every spot you stand is of equal importance. Formal education may be in the past, but the informal one continues day-by-day, year-by-year as long as we're in our right mind. We stop paying tuition to schools, but knowledge isn't free even if no money ever changes hands. We pay attention... we invest time and effort... we struggle to understand our fellow travelers, while struggling even harder to understand ourselves. We may be of age, with a job, family, and home, complete with a dog and two cats. On the surface it appears perfect, but without real depth it becomes little more than a comfy narrow rut. Building a surface life isn't always easy, but digging deeper never is; one requires a heartbeat, while the other demands a hearts true desire. Whenever we stop pursuing knowledge we abandon growth and admit that being stuck on stupid is good enough. Doing the very least of what can be done then redoing it daily will sustain life, but it truly discourages any really living. The more we know... the further we go!
Being true to our nature is a spiritual responsibility of monumental proportion, yet many spend a lifetime ignoring its very existence. Truly, if we can't even decide what we're really made of we aren't fit to decide much else. Many bitch about the ruts they're stuck in, yet never attempt escape. Freedom is possible for everyone; determination is the only key. We gaze at the surface and believe that's all there is, when just a peek behind the façade will reveal so much more than the obvious. We rush too much, like this is a race, and miss so much in the mad dash to the finish line.
Making every day a little life helps adjust our vision, so the little things of great import don't get so easily overlooked. Sight is relative; the direction we point our attention is where we see the most of whatever scenery surrounds the thing centered inside our gaze. The length of time we focus and the intensity of the attention paid either earns knowledge or robs us of it, according to our determination to really see and understand the landscape.
THINK ABOUT IT... LET IT RIDE... THEN YOU DECIDE!!!
© GLENDA ALEXANDER
