I was listening to a rabbi the other morning, and he was saying that before I get out of bed, I should just stop, stop for five minutes, and just reflect. Be quiet, be at peace.
Reflect about life and love, and the great gratitude that we all should have for being alive. And I thought to myself, wow, if the average person had time to reflect, what would they think about? And this, of course, includes me.
What would I think about? Well, I think most of us would immediately place ourselves in some form of timeline. How old am I?
30 years old, for example. And they would reflect on the past. What have I accomplished to this point?
And what will happen in the future? And then I think you would be overwhelmed with the idea that, guess what? These are my own private thoughts.
No one can get into these thoughts unless I invite them in by sharing those thoughts. So whether those thoughts are pure or prurient doesn’t really matter, does it? Because they’re mine.
Unless I really make an effort to discuss them, no one would ever know. Ever. And herein lies a bit of a sad point, in a sense, is that how many people really know that they can actually nurture this magnificent mind.
And you know, the mind needs to be trained, right? For sure. It cannot develop without some form of education, some form of experience.
You would never really grow without those aspects, would you?
But if you think that I live in the external, right? It’s always about what I achieve. I go to school to get a job, make some money, meet a girl or a boy, save some money, retire, die.
Well, that’s it, baby, as they say. But that’s not the purpose to life, and certainly that’s not why we reflect, is it? We reflect, I think at least, to discover who we truly are.
I mean, what are my talents? And what are my gifts?
And unless I really spend some time talking to me, discussing thoughts with me, I think I’ll never know the potential of what I could become, because as I said just now, that living in the external world, it’s a false world, because that is going to
change for sure. The friends that you have at 16 years old, for the most part, won’t be there at 60 years old. Your family will remain, and that’s why family is so very precious.
And sadly, people that have a bad family or no family inevitably suffer because they don’t have a pin, because everything else is ephemeral. It’s changing, as I’m speaking. Time is running along, isn’t it?
So why do we need time for private reflection? Well, I think obviously we need time to analyze what’s going on in the exterior world. What happened today?
What drama went on today in my life? Or what success? What success happened?
How do I put it in perspective? The perspective of me and my world. And I think in a sense, in this age of comparison, we live so much in the exterior world, comparing ourselves to others that we forget.
There will always be someone more handsome or more beautiful than me. Great sadness to say this, but it’s true. There will always be someone more intelligent than me.
Guaranteed, without any question at all. But there will never be anyone who knows me like me.
But of course, if I don’t grab hold of that, I guess you could call it personal agency, in a sense, unless I grab hold of that, it will just run away, absolutely.
You know, there is a voice in all of us, I believe, that quiet voice, perhaps that liaison or relationship with God that actually talks to you directly. You can be totally honest with your thoughts, right?
And with those thoughts, you can begin to sort out, you know, what those things in the exterior world that are valuable to you, of course, and the things that are not. And I think you have to decide.
When I was 18 years old, I worked for a company and I was a salesman and I was good at it.
I was making a lot of money for the firm and the man, he said to me, Look, Leon, if you will spend five years here, I will give you 20% of the shares of this business, which would have meant that by the time I was 23 or 24 years old, I would have
been financially wealthy. Buy the car you wanted, dated or married the girl you wanted, probably because you would have some money, had the house you wanted, just went on, right?
All the material possessions you could have desired would have been there at a very, very early age.
But you wouldn’t have known the greater world because my village had about 1,000, 1,500 people isolated from the next town by three and a half hours of gravel road. So wealth in the town or wealth in the mind. And I fortunately took the latter.
I decided to go with wealth in the mind to see what this world would offer me. And it’s been the right choice some 50 years later. I’m still thankful that I made that decision.
And you know, also when you escape from the material, it also deepens your sense of creativity. Thoughtfulness, the poetry that you can always espouse comes out of you, or the music, or whatever it is, right? Truly.
And I think the more you talk to yourself, the more you realize that you could be fooled. And also if you hold a position, the statement that I really enjoy is, I could be wrong. I don’t think I’m wrong, but I could be wrong.
And I think that always is there, right? That gives people the benefit of the doubt.
And I really think some of the horrible things that have occurred in the 20th century, with the great German nation killing the people that it did, average people joining the army, the Einsatzgruppe, the Gestapo, whatever it was, average people
killed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, because I think they ultimately really didn’t think. killed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, because I think they ultimately really didn’t
think. I think there’s no difference between those people and me. The only difference is more experience, of course, and more knowledge about evil in the world. But we are essentially the same people.
So if we don’t reflect, if we don’t think, obviously what awaits us potentially is just not good. This evil will be perpetuated again, won’t it? But I think if we think, then we realize that we’re all the same.
It’s unnecessary to kill each other. Absolutely. Recently, I don’t know if you followed this, but there’s been a bombing, a suicide bombing in New Delhi, and the group itself is driven by or managed by a group of doctors.
Doctors, of all things, right? People who are supposed to protect and nurture life, and obviously, in all their knowledge, these were not wise people, were they? Because they got tricked probably by religion, I suppose.
But this is not God’s message. God’s message is not about killing in any religion. It’s about love, isn’t it?
It’s about love. So, the next time you wake up in the morning, spend a few moments reflecting.
Spend some time to reflect. And then, throughout the day, catch yourself. That’s why you have a notebook, right?
Catch yourself with those brilliant thoughts. Write them down, those unique ideas. Control them, because you can nurture them, obviously, at a later date, right?
And I think you have to remind yourself, there’s no one like me. There never has been, there never will be. But once again, as I said, ad infinitum.
So what? Unless you decide to open the door to you and nurture the being, the being that you’ve been given by God, that special, unique life form, that piece of life that you’ve been offered, right? This is a very important concept.
So reflect. And you know what they say. You know what they say.
Critical thinking is everything, especially if you want to reflect about life and love and lasting reality. And critical thinking is great. Truly great.
You take care. God bless. Bye-bye.