It occurs to me…

“If you cannot do great things yourself, remember that you may do small things in a great way.” Napoleon Hill

It is easy to see greatness in a finished product, easy to forget that the creation was incremental. This quote is a nice reminder that greatness is a culmination of smaller, “bite-sized” components, that appearances aside, greatness is granular. I’m trying to think of an exception and can’t come up with one. The Great Sand Dunes are grains of sand. The Great Wall of China is a collection of grains of materials formed into a wall. A great piano player achieves greatness one lesson at a time, a great writer one word (or one letter, one thought) at a time….

It is easy to be intimidated by greatness. I can’t always be great, but I can be granular. Then the greatness will take care of itself.

Photo taken while looking up at the sky on a recent round of golf. The heavens offered no answer for my slice, only a good photo.

Photo taken recently in Galveston. Text is a nice conundrum from a poem by Tom Hennen.

Mark Twain — “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

He’s correct, of course.  Why suspend critical thinking just because you come to the same conclusion as a lot of others who are also wrong.  History is full of majorities coming to incorrect decisions – getting it wrong.  Hubris is at play here, of course.  “How could we possibly all be wrong?”  Yet we are, with startling frequency.  There are, of course, many egregious examples of the majority getting it horribly wrong, but the one I keep handy, my Exhibit 1, is that photo of the blue polyester leisure-suited me taken in the 1970s.  Harmless, of course, but a gentle reminder of Twain’s point.

Photo (which I am told was taken on the Denali Highway in Alaska) and the accompanying thought are both from a good friend. I just stuck ’em togethere on the screen. I like the thought of the heart and the brain as traveling companions.

From Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself

“In all people I see myself, none more, and not one a barley corn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.”

And to make things clear to me, I looked it up – a “barley corn” is a unit of length equal to about 1/3 of an inch.  That is, not much.

Photo taken a few weeks ago in Galveston. Poem is a favorite from David Budbill.

“Purpose” seems presumptive, intimidating, even grandiose.  Must every day, every action, every thing have one?  Meandering is allowed – perhaps, at times, encouraged.

This stuck with me from a podcast I was listening to yesterday on a run. Photo taken a while back.

“Information is not wisdom.”

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

It is easy to confuse the two — information and knowledge.  Seems that today the focus is on information, often at the expense of wisdom.  Let’s let Webster’s weigh in:

Wisdom – “ability to discern inner qualities and relationships”

Information – “knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction”

Which seems to call for:

Knowledge – “the fact or condition of being aware of something”

I think Webster’s is onto something.  Wisdom involves some level of discernment that information and knowledge does not.