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Why don't we follow the teachings of the great thinkers who have come before us?

Do you ever pause from an act of creation and think, what's the point of this? Someone has already written a better poem or essay or blog post. Others have painted better portraits or crafted better knickknacks or knit better scarves. I can get a dress on Amazon for less money than I will spend on the fabric, and the craftmanship will be better too. Why create?

I think this all the time. The logical conclusion is not an optimistic one: why do anything, because it's all been done before, and better, by others?

In particular, to our point here, all the writing on kindness and love has been written and rewritten and translated and adapted for every age, every people.

We have Moses. We have the Buddha. We have Jesus Christ. We have modern writers and gurus and leaders of all kinds.

The teachings are there, sitting on our dusty shelves or buried deep in our subconscious.

Have we listened?

Have we truly understood these teachings from these great saints and leaders?

And if we have attained a modicum of understanding, then have we tried to integrate the lessons into our own lives?

And this leads me to a tangential point: 

Perhaps we need to keep creating our own versions of these stories and teachings, so we can better learn them ourselves.

I might not be able to say it better, but I can try to say something. Maybe it will be of value. Maybe the repetition itself is valuable.

Have a kind week, month, year - and beyond.


Comments

joeometry said…
It's a good question, and a good meditation. Indeed, why anything? What's the point of it all? It does feel good to have a job where you can sometimes feel uniquely valued -- teaching -- where at the least it seems like there's a need for a particular person to be with children, and breathing oxygen and pumping blood human -- in this I don't think the robots will replace the humans. Competition and the increasingly global nature of culture, that's tough. I remember reading about the plight of the local poet, who could perhaps gain a bit of renown and appreciation. But now we have the 'greatest' poets available to us in our pockets, whether classic or purveying their verses on twitter or whatever. Yet this is not what seems to drive most creation. We're not just interested in the product, are we?
//please excuse the rambling nature of this comment//I guess I was more interested in sharing some thoughts than the coherence of the final product, ha!
- Joe - (I'm not a robot!)
Dear Emily, I find your blogs so well written...shows how passionate and dedicated are you in writing down the topic you have choosen....Seriously if people would consider living life filled with gratitude and kindness , this place would have been filled with peace and harmony :)

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