BY KLAUS DÖRING
ARGUABLY, if you live your life out of the love of wisdom, both in thought and action and desire or emotion (‘love’ being a desire or emotion), you are living a philosophical life even if you have never heard of the term ‘philosophy’ or attended any course in philosophy.
Philosophy is an activity of thought, a type of thinking. Philosophy is critical and comprehensive thought, the most critical and comprehensive manner of thinking which the human species has yet devised. This intellectual process includes both an analytic and synthetic mode of operation.
Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Clearly, that’s an exaggeration. Nevertheless, some philosophers have argued that if we don’t pay attention to why we live in a certain way rather than any other, we risk “misliving” our only life, getting to the end of it, on our proverbial death bed, and thinking: “shoot, I wasted it!” Or, as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych puts it: “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done… But how could that be, when I did everything properly?”
We all need personal philosophy in life or we risk wandering, and responding to random stimuli and information with little or no impact on our long-term goals.
A philosophy of life is an overall vision or attitude towards life and the purpose of it. Human activities are limited by time, and death but we forget this. We fill up our time with distractions, never asking whether they are important, whether we really find them of value. Without a personal philosophy, we end up living without direction.
Remember that it’s less important how fast you’re traveling, and more important to be headed the right way. The surest way to get where you want to go is to travel in the right direction.
People who have made genuine changes in their lives and managed to attain difficult goals are not stronger, more intelligent or fearless than you. The only difference is the decision to act in the direction of their dreams.
Successful people have a definite sense of direction. They have a clear understanding of what success means to them. Everything they do is consistent with their goals. They look forward and decide where they want to be. Their day-to-day actions help them move closer to their vision.
Once you find your WHY, you will be more careful and selective about your daily actions. Almost facing the age of 71 next month, I learned most of all these things from my Philippine family living here as expatriate for almost 26 years.
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Email: doringklaus@gmail.com or follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin or visit www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com.or www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com./PN
