Guess what? Gayle said in a certain situation today that we were both involved in that my vulnerability came through. I was left asking – is she so unobservant on every other occasion. Then came through a link to a blog. This (professional) person had been reading a book by Viktor Frankl and for each Enneagram number she put out a quote for each one.
I will put two of them up here. One was for Gayle and one for me. When I read mine I simply laughed, loved the quote and then thought – and still do think – and why on earth would one want to do that? Of course the whole direction the quote is pushing in is (and even I admit that) correct. But why do it that way? Hey I am but 67 years of age, how could anyone that young ever take time to slow down and reflect – I thought that was something one might begin to attempt in the second half of life. Gayle, meanwhile reads and responds with a little frown on her face and a more ‘yes that’s so true, I had better adjust’. Just a thought when she is as old as me surely she too will simply laugh and go ‘haven’t changed since I was 12 so not going to happen now’.
Here are the quotes… no clues which one for who?
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes… Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
Here’s a link to the article:
Hello there, I tried to message on FB about this – but at the beginning of the pandemic, you wrote a prophetic perspective in which you predicted that “a far greater crisis will be here in 2022, not a virus but a combination of events / circumstances that together will present our world with a crisis of significant proportions”.
I was just wondering how you’d respond to these words, especially now that 2022 is over. What crisis did we witness that was “far greater” than the pandemic?
Thanks so much for the comment / question. (I do not use FB other than to post that I have written something on my site… hence I have did not see any comment there.)
I do have a video on YouTube concerning my perspectives on 2022 – can be seen here if interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37pjEaVyxhE&t=5s
My perspective was that we are coming into a season when it will not be one crisis but a series of crises that together would present an overall set of problems that would be greater than COVID itself presented. I saw that continuing through to the Spring of 2023. (Today or tomorrow I will present some perspectives that I see for 2023.)
COVID has continued – and in the last few days the extent of the coming crisis in China is becoming visible. With the Chinese new year etc., there will be spikes… and on some sites I was reading yesterday they were predicting from now of anything between 1 million – 13 million a day of new infections.
Food shortages, animal culling, scandal in the EU (I had not specified EU), Ukraine…
Away from what I said… I think the wider span of crises and the depth of some of them I do not believe will disappear / lessen in a short period of time. I consider that we are going to have to navigate our way through these for the next 18 or so years.
None of the above is to defend what I have written / said… and the bigger issue that I have been very challenged by at the end of this year is a ‘so what?’ kind of question. We ‘see in part’, try to avoid joining the dots too quickly, but the big question is ‘even if all of this is pointing in the right direction, so what, what are we do in response?’.
I am very grateful for your comment / question – hope the above goes a small way in making a response that will help you as you, like us all, navigate the way forward.