manali

Wisdom in a Wilderness of Waffle!

In our media driven world it is becoming genuinely hard to discern the truth from a thousand voices of distortion, spin, obfuscation and often downright deviousness. Perhaps it’s not surprising, as much of the information that we need to assess, weigh, clarify to make our daily decisions comes in bite size chunks. But the fogginess and fuzziness of what we hear goes much deeper.

It seems that in both political and corporate worlds in particular it is often quite hard to find honest voices. Smokescreens, spinning, deflecting and denying now appear to be the conditioned responses to the call for accountability. Power is being protected, personal agendas pursued and it’s hard to see the difference between the political and the personal.

In sport the idea of playing the game for the sake of the game is dying fast. The prize is paramount, and participation is often relegated to the level of necessity in order to collect the cheque. The ‘joy of playing’ is a distant echo of sporting times gone by. Money does the talking and almost every individual sport is now being reduced to a business. And business is seldom playful.

In the exploding areas of health and well-being there are so many opinions in a jungle of conflicting views. It’s almost impossible to work out what’s good or bad for your body. Some say drink lots of water others say no need, some say take vitamins and supplements others say it’s a waste of money, some scientists say we all might have BSE, others say nonsense, some say cholesterol kills, others say it is essential for good health. We can believe all too easily and unwittingly the loudest or most recent voice and then cry victim of propaganda and the agenda of commercial interest when we hear contradictory views.

So where are we to find the wisdom that we need to shape our decisions and guide our life. Ultimately the wisest voice is our own. Unfortunately so many of us have become so busy engaging with the world, pursuing more work, connecting with more and more people, we have lost the art of ‘listening in’ to our own wisdom and our own intuition.