Sunday, December 31, 2017

DO YOU HAVE A HEAD AND HEART TO DARE TO BE DIFFERENT IN 2018?

MAKING GREAT CHOICES: Learning to use your head and heart.
                            (Chukua control wewe mwenyewe)

We are all warming up to enter the new year and excited to see the year 2018. We need to build a foundation, and a strong one that can help us survive through the year. 

We need to have an ambitious vision of the future, and stand for values that are not for sale. We need to create an enduring core but also be prepared to change everything else. We need to preserve the core and stimulate inner progress. 

There should be something to incite us lest we become immuned and simply indifferent.  If you have no core principles, you will fail, more so if you are not apart of changing the world around you. How do we make this decisions in 2018?

You need to set a tool of engagement and operation of doing things, amidst the dilemma we have to resolve. So instead of looking outside ourselves for answers in bookstores shelves when we face major decisions. We have to learn to look inside ourselves with ever greater confidence through 2018.

Newman’s wise maxim brings to me great memories… “To live is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” We know that bad outcomes don’t always indicate bad decisions. Good marriage requires lifelong work, sacrifice, compromise and mutual support. 

Marriages fall apart for all kinds of reasons, sometimes not because the decision to wed was misguided but because either partner or both stopped working at the marriage. The partners may have chosen well but failed to live out their choices day and day.

We can’t resolve most of our consequential life decisions by punching numbers into calculators. Everything has to be done when we sit down and start confronting each other, than simply becoming hearers and carrying rumours of what is happening on others. We can’t be experts of solving other people’s problems, life has a lot many problems than adding more problems of others into your years.

The straightforward choice between two people’s proposals may follow a gut-wrenching decision to accept a job/mission transfer and relocate your family/community. Some of us pay a lot of attention to feelings and thus make irrational, emotionally driven decisions. Others of us feel comfortable only with tangibles we can measure or count, so we completely ignore our inner voice. 

We need a rigorous method for decision making that incorporates both hard facts and intangibles such as feelings, values, and religious beliefs. Instead of compartmentalizing, we need to make whole-life decisions for whole-life strategies.

We need to choose wisely. To use our heads through 2018 to know our talents, circumstances, opportunities and beliefs, and means using our heart and spirit to make free choices that bring peace rather than regrets. Decision making is an art, not a sterile science of lining up a few facts. 

You have to use your intuition rather than on facts in running the business of life. The higher you advance in your life and profession is a more you need to use your intuition. The difference between happiness and misery often lies in the ability to choose well. (Proverbs 3:13-15, 18-19)
Blessed is the man that finds wisdom and is rich in prudence:
14
The purchasing thereof is better than the merchandise of silver, and her fruit than the chiefs and purest gold:
15
She is more precious than all riches: and all the things that are desired, are not to be compared with her.
18
She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her: and he that shall retain her is blessed.
19
The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth, hath established the heavens by prudence.

The root of the word wisdom means “seeing” or “knowing” Sometimes we don’t see that we are on the wrong track. We lack wisdom. Each one of us ought to be wiser than we are today. To be sure wisdom will remain to some extent both a gift and mystery. Wisdom is at home in the mind of one who has understanding, but it is not known in the heart of fools (Proverbs 14:33)
                          33
In the heart of the prudent resteth wisdom, and it shall instruct all the ignorant.
The first step towards attaining wisdom is to desire it in the heart. The fool doesn’t even desire wisdom because he doesn’t recognize its value. The art of wisdom is instructive. 

And as most arts, we pursue it by learning certain practices and applying them considerately and patiently, we improve with time and practice. The wisdom we seek is spiritual in nature and grounded, but it is also worldly. Wisdoms makes us whole people who are spiritual yet fully immersed in the world. 

We rarely use the word wisdom in our daily interactions. Wisdom may be nice to come by and comforting in old age but largely irrelevant to the day-today-today business of living.

Basic facts of making good decisions in 2018. Some elements of Ignatian Spirituality could be handy at this point in time. (30 days of retreat) not only for the religious but all who feel the need to see something better than what you are seeing and for better sobriety.
1.      Take charge of your life
2.      Retreat to go forward
3.      Control the controllables
4.      Free yourself
5.      Recognize consolation and desolation
6.      Get (real) friend

7.      Do it over again… and again…

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