The One Thing

By

Bill Cottringer

“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”  Oliver Wendell Holmes.

     It is a safe bet that most of us spend considerable time searching for that one thing that can make us smart, happy, successful and content or fill the nagging void inside. I have searched seven decades for this :one thing,” finding it a couple of different times, then losing it and finding out it was really much more than one thing, and then finally one really big thing that took many years to see suddenly appeared. You could say this is a typical human journey in life and how thinking evolves.

     So what is this big thing that is a lot bigger than most other big things we search for? In a word, “understanding.” In a sentence, “understanding how life and people work so we can be more successful in our encounters, especially resolving the conflicts we have with others and life, and even within our own selves. Understanding conflicts is the best start to resolving them.

     The first half of life we learn to find success by taking things apart and discovering how the individual parts work well alone. During the second half of life, we learn the value of putting all these things we have taken apart back together again to see how the whole works better than the individual parts to achieve more success than any of the individual parts can alone. The Chicago Bulls, made up of a whole team of superstars used the Gestalt Principle to become the greatest NBA Basketball team ever. Michael Jordan realized he was a team member more than anyone, despite his unpatrolled individual success. But of course in all fairness to the great Warrior team of the last few seasons is close on the Bull’s heals!

   Now back to wisdom and understanding. Even the Christian Bible and other religious books place a very high value on wisdom, even more than love and charity. That is because wisdom hides all the other good things of value, including love and charity. Simply stated, wisdom is the acceptance and sound understanding of reality, mainly how life works and how all the parts fit together to achieve the best results for all the rest of life.

     Of course one of the most important insights in developing this sort of understanding is the realization of the fundamental interconnectedness of things. When we start noticing things, like our attitude towards trust and the effect that has on our trusting others and the trust experiences that result, our understanding and wisdom grows and abundance follows. Some fortunate folks figure this out early on, but some us wait until it is almost too late to use to our benefit.

     Going back to the opening quote, it is understanding the exceptions which turns a half-truth into a whole one and really, only whole truths are worth collecting. Remember the saying, the “early bird gets the first worm? Well the rest of that story is the first worm gets eaten!  

    Probably the greatest temptation in our search for wisdom and understanding are these appealing half-truths that easily seduce even smart, skeptical people. But it is these many half-truths, like the many this and that’s which our words have created—free will vs. determinism, nature vs. nurture, religion vs. science, good vs. evil, intelligent vs. ignorant, and all the other polar opposites—which collectively slow our quest down and delay our free will conveniently bumping into our destiny in finding our “one thing.”

    So what is the point here because I think I have one? It is this: Truth can’t remain hidden forever so if you haven’t found your “one thing” yet keep searching. You will eventually find it. The trouble is that it is probably right under your nose (My English Springer Spaniel would certainly agree!)

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” ~Aristotle  Or as Socrates would counter: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”