We live together in this world but we always fight and compete with
each other over own benefits, so life becomes worse and worse. Kindness or compassion is one of the important elements of ethics, but in reality it is perceived as cowardice and weakness.
SNAKE & DOVE
In our life, we are usually prone to fall into two extremes. The first extreme is to use our wisdom to deal with events in our lives and then lose our morals gradually i.e. human being is naturally selfish so sometimes we use our wisdom to harm or take advantage of others for our own benefits. The second extreme is to live submissively and stupidly without being knowledgeable and always have to obey others' orders. This weakness often causes more harm to our own lives.
These are the two extreme cases that we all need to avoid. However though, most of us fall into one of these two extremes. Those who are smart and strong are easy to fall into the first extreme. Those who are not smart enough and are weak would usually fall into the second extreme. They are easy to be taken advantage of or affected by others.
For those newly graduates, they finished university, and were being exposed to the new world in which they met many different kinds of people. In this society, people must be wise to compete with each other because of the conception "Compassion means Stupidity". It is perceived that compassionate people are unwise and dull, as well as they are not brave enough to live on their own and achieve any success. They worship wise and tough people and struggle for their rights in life. So these young people's conception of life change accordingly and this is really sad.
We live together in this world but we always fight and compete with each other over own benefits, so life becomes worse and worse. Kindness or compassion is one of the important elements of ethics, but in reality it is perceived as cowardice and weakness. Clearly, this perception is completely wrong. If we only consider one in many meanings of kindness and compassion and are being narrow-minded, we will be led to having inaccurate judgment. To avoid falling into the two extremes, we should be wise as snakes and kind as doves.
So what does "be wise as snakes and kind as doves" mean? And what is the difference between being wise and being kind?
To understand "wisdom", we need to analyse three basic points.
First, we must analyse the past event, what has happened, and learn from those experiences. For instance, since we made errors on the last exam, we scored low points. So we worked harder for the next exam in order to achieve higher score. Recognising and learning from our failure to live better is a mandatory element of wisdom, too.
In addition to this, acknowledging others' good points is also important to help us develop and enhance our knowledge. Why are there so many people that can be very persuasive? What they say could influence others. So if we recognise their strengths, respect and learn from these influential people, we will gradually improve ourselves. Now, that is wise.
The second point of wisdom is the ability to predict what will happen in the future based on the present. This basically means we would practise predicting future events i.e. what will happen, when and how. This factor is extremely essential for everyone.
We would do everything for a better future. However, what did we learn from school? We have learned many things that happened in the past e.g. known events and old scientific inventions...
The subject of "Futurism" started to gain interest incoming test. We should try to guess what would happen and how.
Initially, we would predict what could happen in a short time, later on, we could predict what could happen in a long time. We could think about our personal life, our family or further to social issues, security, national politics and the world. We could try to predict about how the world would turn out to be in ten years times; or in twenty years, how human beings would progress in technology and what inventions would be available. Those who could predict those important and big events would be very talented. They could base on the current findings to predict the breakthrough and achievements in the future.
Have you ever heard about an invention against noise? It consisted of two parts. The first part was to analyse the noises coming from the outside. The analysis result will then be passed on to the second part, the processor. The processor then created the outgoing noise by reversing the incoming one. Because the two sound waves were opposite of each other, they destroyed each other, hence the noise disappear. Thus, knowing the nature of sound, we knew then how to eliminate noise.
At present, the world is worried about bush fires because bush/forest resource is an invaluable asset of mankind. Maybe in ten or twenty years later, when scientists discover about the nature of fire, they may be able to find an effective and easy way to extinguish it. Have you ever thought about this?
The third element of wisdom is the ability to assess other people to cooperate with at work. If you could make accurate assessment, you would reduce the risk of failure and improve the success rate, and product good result. This ability plays a very influential role in communication or selection of friends or business partners. The difficulty is the ability to assess someone to decide if we can trust them or not. Finding the right people for the jobs is a great challenge to all leaders. We should not believe in those who never keep their words. For those types of people, we should always be armed with strategy to deal with any challenges.
Or for people who are malicious and selfish, then we should find a way to leverage from their strengths but always be on alert with their potential malicious acts. Assessing someone accurately is even really critical and beneficial in marriage.
So from the above discussion, we can see that these three elements of wisdom include learning from past experiences, the ability to predict the future, and the ability to assess people accurately. These are three important factors that you need to practise before entering into the real world full of challenges.
Written by:
Janna
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