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…
No comments:
Post a Comment