Discern Meant

Madame:

As usual, you are far more practical than me.  Readers, inculcate “the power of everyday” into your lives!  If you are fretting about what you may or may not be able to control, at least be in control of that!

In a topic that may be related to what you’ve just written, I think we Americans largely have a deficiency.  Am not referring to a vitamin deficiency, or sleep deficiency, or any of the other things we may or may not be deficient in. 

We have a deficiency of:

Discernment.

We do a poor job of discerning what’s best for ourselves, our families, our communities, our society, our nation, our world.

Not only do we give up the hard thinking to “experts” and demagogues, but the patterns of our thoughts are often sub-optimal.  And one poorly thought through decision often builds (or rather, undermines) another until we have a cascading effect.  When those effects interlink with others, it then becomes an ocean full of tsunamis for ourselves, our society, our nation, our world.

And when we fail to analyze our poor decisonmaking, and fail to analyze the patterns of our thoughts and processes which contributed to that poor decision, we retard ourselves and most everyone and everything directly or indirectly connected to us.  When we operate on sheer emotion for too much too long, we make our free wills a delusion, and give control to those who know how to manipulate or take advantage of that.  When we reward, via spectacle or diversion, our poor decisionmaking, we imprint denial on ourselves, and when we take false comfort that many others are doing it as well, we become carriers of institutionalized denial.

Decisions matter.   Failing to decide also matters.  Decisions and indecisions about things our inner selves understand are important for our communities, society, world, matter even more.

We should give most of them more than a little thought.