Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The Wisest Question: “What Do I Not Yet Understand?”

It’s an easy enough question to answer, isn’t it, but not many of us do. Not many of us often enough ask this crucial life-success question and we suffer in ignorance for it. Asking ‘What do I not yet understand?’ can open the door to all sorts of insights and revelations—that is if we can handle the truth that’s bound to come.

Life presents us with many challenges and tests, and these are also indicators—with our responses—of the things we’ve not yet mastered. The things we’re presently flailing upon or failing in or getting frustrated by (our relationships, tasks, situations, thoughts, skills etc) are the very things that present opportunities for us—opportunities to grasp.

It’s like our responses to things... watch these. The first heart/mind response that comes is likely to be at the root of the problem. We can’t help get defensive about certain things—it’s our basic proud human nature to do so.

Being aware of how we take these things can provide valuable self-reflective insight as to what to do to address these issues.

When we take a good, hard honest look there are many situations in life that we routinely deal with but don’t fully or properly understand. Ignorance is the prevailing human standard and default—partly or fully. We should actually be programmed to more often ask of ourselves, ‘Get more fact.’

Being a human being is a very humbling state if we’re straight about it. We’re quite often wrong and it doesn’t help when we deny reality in the quest to ‘be right.’ It helps no one.

This is, in a sense, not anything about becoming perfect—perfectionism is an errant goal in itself. But it is about being open more and more to the reality that we don’t know it all and quite possibly, from time to time, we might just lack some understanding. It happens.

There is a glorious flipside to this simple fact: the more we seek clarification in augmenting the learning process, situation by situation, the less misunderstanding we’ll actually get into and the more credibility we’ll establish.

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