Wisdom

Thought for the day from If Minds Had Toes by Lucy Eyre. Picture a football. [This is a British story - so picture a soccer ball.] Imagine that the space inside the ball represents everything you know. And the space outside the ball represents everything you don't know. The surface of the ball represents everything that you know you don't know. As your knowledge (the ball) expands, so does the surface. The more you know, the more you know that you don't know. And this, Socrates would say, is the beginning of wisdom.

I think there's a parallel with accomplishments. Say the space inside the ball represents everything you've done and the space outside the ball represents everything you haven't done. The surface of the ball represents everything you want to do.

I'm increasingly frustrated that I can't seem to do everything at once - or even one after the other. I'm really going to have to get better time management skills or start eliminating some things from my "to do" list - or both.

When I turned thirty it occured to me that I was probably never going to climb Mt Everest. Climbing Mt Everest had never actually been on my list, but it was my very first realization that possibly there were some things I was never going to do. I was in my forties when my mother died and I realized there are some things I'm not going to be able to change.

Let me tell you, I'm not happy about it. It's requiring ever more difficult choices about what's important and what can be set aside. "... the wisdom to know the difference."