Speak Easy Note #11 - Words of Wisdom: Living an Informed Life

This week I received an email from a dear friend who wrote and questioned:

• “The whole of my life is burnt into these days with my daughter and grandchildren. Everything I have ever done, thought and experienced seems to be concentrated into the moment. I am now waiting for my sense of the rest of my life to come into the moment as well. I think it will. Then the whole of my life will be concentrated into every moment that I live. What is this sensation? Is it aging? Is it just that things long passed are recalled with such frequency and clarity as one gets older? Is it the sense of a life? Is it the getting of wisdom? Is it having learned how to live?”

Many thoughts blended into questions … When I read my friend’s words, I was immediately reminded of the Rilke quote about not searching for answers but living the questions so that one day you will discover that you have lived into the answers:

• ...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903

in Letters to a Young Poet

With age comes wisdom and acceptance. Most of all though, it is only through age that you can have a certain perspective and wealth of experience that cannot be available to you in the same way earlier in life. This varies from person to person. Some never get there at all or never come to exist on any deeper level of consciousness.

Life will always be full of mystery and unanswered questions no matter how old you are or what your experiences are. And so we come to two golden words:


"ACCEPTANCE"

This above all else: It is about LETTING GO, knowing and accepting what IS and what remains outside of one's control to change.


"CONSCIOUSNESS"

It is about the perspective of valuing what life is in full measure - of having lived an experienced life that informs and provides the KNOWING.



And so I bring you two words this week to savor and to live, rather than providing the mechanical techniques to enhance communication that I frequently share from SPEAK EASY - The Communication Guide for Career and Life Success. It will be through living these two words deeply that communication can reach the highest level of enrichment possible. Communication improvement techniques are wonderful to learn and practice; they can bring much benefit. It is the LETTING GO and living an INFORMED and CONSCIOUS life that matters most of all.

Until next Friday,
The Wordsmith