Discernment

Discernment.

First things first, right?

If I’m going to engage in a discussion about making something from everything, we need to talk about discernment. It seems like a perfect place to start! We have no lack of input, no lack of inspiration, no lack of voices to listen to… and often… absolutely no clue where to start.

“The acquiring and amassing of knowledge – that’s nothing. This is the age where knowledge is accessible to all. Wisdom will be how to interpret, how to integrate. What parts to keep in, what parts to keep out”.

So said my friend, years ago (more or less – I like to pretend I remember conversations verbatim). I can’t even remember the context – but the truth of what he was saying was immediately clear. What do we spend our time, our money, our attention on, when nearly everything is available. How do we learn to listen to our lives, make meaning, when there is just so much noise and distraction?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(That’s the shrug emoji…in this context, it’s the equivalent of ‘hell if I know’).

…

Seriously. I don’t know. I’ve probably got a few theories, but they’re all less than half baked, and almost always a bastardization of what what someone much smarter than me has figured out. But discernment! Wisdom! This is the work, of that I’m completely sure.

This is the second post I’ve published, but the third I’ve written for Something From Everything. Let me explain. The third post, all about a wonderful podcast I’m listening to on the Great War, needed to be written. The podcast occupies a lot of my mental space these days, and I suddenly had a great insight into my newfound love of history. So I wrote that post, before I finished this one. Buoyed by the fact that I had made something (a post, a take away, meaning) from everything (a combination of this recent podcast and interactions with my friends and strangers). I decided to come back to this post, secured in the idea that discernment needed to come first.

But what if that’s dead wrong? What if you don’t get to know which voices are worth listening to when you start listening to them? What if wisdom is not learned before an undertaking, but during?

So because I’ve been focusing on events from a century ago, let’s employ an old adage: “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”.  We often say “the proof is in the pudding’ but the take away is the same: We don’t get to know the true value of something at the outset. It would be great if I had a fool-proof template for discernment – for which voices are worth listening to, what is worth keeping in, what is worth keeping out – and I’m sure that on some level, intuitively, we do have some sort of template for what is worth our time/effort/resources. But we are developing that template; and we get to be surprised, too! We get into engage in this work of meaning making with both the significant and mundane, the trustworthy and unknown.

We get to start the work before we ever feel ready to.

Which is good. Because otherwise I might already be out of things to say…