Tannishblog

What is wisdom? I ask this with an open heart, yet even so I come up with a smarmy answer on my first try. My inner brat tells me that wisdom is out of style, an archaic commodity of no real value. My inner brat is, as usual, wrong. Wisdom is the ability to view long and wide, to remove our needy selves from a decision, to understand that grasping is not the only way to get something. I would like to share a little wisdom from one of my favorite people, someone I’ve never met:

A great deal of our suffering comes from having too many thoughts. And, at the same time, the way we think is not sane. We are only concerned by our immediate satisfaction and forget to measure its long-term advantages and disadvantages, either for ourselves or for others. But such an attitude always goes against us in the end. There is no doubt that by changing our way of seeing things we could reduce our current difficulties and avoid creating new ones.

~ His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Please take the time to re-read these words. Think about how they can apply to your life, and how they can be applied to the world. Think, if you will, how can they apply to our current political struggles. In our hyper-connected world no action is independant; like raindrops on a quiet lake, the actions of one person or group create ripples affecting the next person or group, and so on. No longer can people think that their lives and deeds are isolated, that they can do what they want irregardless of others. We are all responsible for our planet’s future, and what we do today creates that future. Think carefully. Act carefully. Live carefully.