Good intentions are Not Enough

Movement is not necessarily progress. More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly. Nobody -- remember this -- neither Hitler, nor Lenin, nor any despot you could name, ever came forward with a proposal that read, "Now, let's create a really oppressive and evil society." Hitler said, let's take the means necessary to restore our national pride and civic order. And Lenin said, "Let's take the means necessary to assure a fair distribution of the goods of the world."

In short, it is your responsibility... not just to be zealous in the pursuit of your ideals, but to be sure that your ideals are the right ones. Not merely in their ends, but in their means. That is perhaps the hardest part of being a good human being: Good intentions are not enough. Being a good person begins with being a wise person, then when you follow your conscience, will you be headed in the right direction.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Commencement Address at Langley High School

June 17, 2010

Tough & Tender

In some parts of American society, it is considered inappropriate for men to express any emotion save one—anger. When a man learns to express other feelings and not be so concerned about whether others think he is strong or “manly,” he takes a major step forward.

Sure, there’s a time and place to "come on strong and take no prisoners." But it's a denial of your humanity to oversimplify, hiding behind a narrow definition of manhood. Men are more complete when they are both tough and tender. Maturity comes with the understanding of which one is appropriate at what time. 

Stephen Goforth

The Lessons of Elders

Being unwilling to accept defeat—is a guarantee that one will never learn the lessons that must be learned if one is to mature. That is why the elders that we need so badly in our success-obsessed society are not the natural-born winners who rose to the top without a setback. Such people are easy to idealize, but they have little to teach us. What elders need to help younger people learn is that without releasing the fruits of one season, they cannot blossom into the next. Such elders can show us, because they have done it many times, how to let go of who we have been to clear the ground for the growth of who we are becoming. They can help us to understand the transition-related emotions of grief (sadness for what have let go of), disorientation (when we are lost in the neutral zone), and fear (when the challenges of the unknown new beginnings are overwhelming).

William Bridges,  The Way of Transition

Learning Wisdom

Taking our cue from the machinery and the data that dominate our world, we usually view knowledge as something that accumulates piecemeal over time. You start out with a little, and then you gradually pick up more and more. It’s like possessions: they pile up over time. But passive accumulation isn’t the way that you learn the most important things that you know about the world. First you are immersed in the knowledge, then you get distance from it (and even deny it) and then you return to a new relation with it.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition