MORE CLEAR WISDOM SNIPPETS FROM THE MUDDY TRENCHES
By Bill Cottringer

I seem to get my best insights, looking up at the sky from below in the muddy trenches. Here are 25 more clear wisdom snippets to consider:

1. It never works to try and jump a 20 foot chasm with two ten-foot leaps.
2. The plan of giving us one mouth and two ears had a purpose.
3. Individual slices of Salami are much easier to digest than the whole thing all at once.
4. You can’t change people who are lazy, immoral, lacking in common sense, always right, egocentric , critical, judgmental, negative or angry; their only purpose is to show the rest of us how not to be.
5. When you do the right thing for the right reason in the right way at the right time and have enough patience, you will always get the right results.
6. If you are in a dark, deep, damp hole for God’s sake quit digging deeper; and if you see a light at the end of your tunnel and fear it might be a freight train, have the courage to hop on it and ride it out of the tunnel.
7. A good thing doesn’t have to have a good reason; and there is always some good reason for bad things, you just have to look a little harder.
8. You can never talk your way out of a situation you behaved yourself into.
9. You can never have what you want until you want what you have.
10. An inevitable conclusion about life is that it is a journey to join it in the way it works, no matter how much we object.
11. Mouths were made for smiling, kissing and talking in that order.
12. The best way to build your store of common sense is to ask more questions of those who have it.
13. The most frustrating part of humanness is to know when you are right in your mind and heart and not be able to be that way with your hands.
14. Good judgment comes form experience and experience comes from bad judgment. Hmmm??
15. What goes around comes around, just not as quickly or maybe too quickly, or not in as much intensity as you would prefer or maybe too intensely, depending whether you are on the giving or receiving end.
16. There are only two sets of feelings—good ones and bad ones: the good ones encourage you to keep moving in the direction you are going and the bad ones are trying to warn you that it might be smart to stop, think and try a different approach.
17. You can’t really control someone else, especially when you need to most, but many people die trying anyway.
18. Great progress is made when we stop pretending to be who we aren’t and just be who we are.
19. Only great art, music, literature, poetry and movies can capture the pure truth clearly and completely, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should quit trying.
20. You have to pause a few moments every once in while and get off your ladder to make sure it isn’t placed against the wrong building. It is not good to find that out at the top rung.
21. Treat others the way you want to be treated, unless you want to be treated differently and then it surely won’t work.
22. Thinking, feeling and acting are all tangled up in a pretzel where it is hard to tell when one stops and the other starts or which is causing which; to be successful you have to backtrack in noticing how certain actions are related to certain feelings and how certain feelings are related to certain thoughts. The real trouble though, is that most of your thinking is unconscious, which you need to make conscious.
23. Big minds that achieve big success are big because of open-mindedness.
24. In the end you can’t really prove or disprove anything, so why bother arguing or fighting over improvable things? Kind of silly don’t you think?
25. It is good to not finish some things, despite the need for closure. There is always more to come.


Bill Cottringer runs a security company in Bellevue, WA and writes articles and books and takes pictures on the river at North Bend. Please feel free to comment.