There is so much wisdom stored up in each one of us. I’m amazed by how much comes forth from the most average looking person in a random setting during a seemingly normal activity. We’re all professors of life full of enlightenment who spend most of our lives refusing to talk with ourselves about it and keeping ourselves so busy with everything else that we have no time to realize it.
Why would we avoid it? Because if we slow down, look inward, utilize introspection to know ourselves, then we have to see our challenges, our mistakes, and our lessons. We would be confronted by them and because we are wise we would feel compelled to begin working on them and with them in order to come closer to wholeness and becoming. But we don’t want to. Confronting who we truly are is frightening. People focus on the fact that it’s frightening to realize we’ve made mistakes, to see the challenges ahead of us, to realize we have lessons to learn and know what they are.
But what I have found is more frightening for people is to realize that they are wise. Wisdom implies responsibility. It implies that we will need to think before we act because we know clearly the effects of our actions. It smells suspiciously like moving from childhood into adulthood and, as we all know, that transition sucks. Better to stay uninformed, ignorant, naïve, busy, and with our head down because then we are free of responsibilities. If we remain in this state then the world happens to us, we remain the perpetual student of wiser beings, and can act out without being responsible for the fallout.
But, regardless of how busy we are, how much we strive to keep our heads down, how much we ignore what we know, we actually do know. We know what we’re afraid of, we know what path we should be on, we know what it is we’re avoiding and what will help us achieve our best life. And hopefully, when we’re ready, we’ll look up.