‘A truly wise person never tells you how things are; they
only find ways of encouraging you to find your own truth for yourself.’
Sounds a bit grand, doesn’t it? I’m not sure that I like
grand very much. I never saw myself as a particularly grand sort of person. And
it further occurred to me that if I were to say that to somebody, wouldn’t I be
guilty of telling them how things are? But then, do I claim to be wise? No I
don’t, so I don’t suppose it matters.
But then I thought about all those people of great gravitas
who are supposed to be wise, or at least presumed to be so by those who listen
to them – people like the Dalai Lama and Ghandi and Ricky Gervais. Wouldn’t I
be guilty of insulting the good and the great? I really wouldn’t want to do
that.
And the phrase ‘how things are’ is a pretty wide brief. What
I had in mind when the thought occurred to me was the meaning of life and those
irritating preachers and self-styled gurus who claim to know. But what about
lesser matters, like learning to drive a car? The driving instructor has to
start off by telling the pupil which pedal makes the car go and which one makes
it stop, and that’s telling people how things are. But driving instructors don’t
need to be wise, do they? So I don’t suppose that matters either.
And that’s why I’m struggling. I’ll think on, and probably
abandon the thought on the grounds that I’ve long considered sound bites of
wisdom to be mostly not worth the paper they’re written on. But I still can’t
help feeling that the thought has some merit. And I often wonder whether my
thoughts are not mine at all, but have been put there by somebody bigger than
me. If that is the case, I’m struggling to understand why they would bother.
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