Wisdom AND True Fulfillment - Successive Counterintuitive Choices

     We live in a time when ensuring personal comfort, convenience & pleasure seems to be of paramount importance. We try to do so by carefully selecting and modifying our external environment, which in turn is supposed to improve our inner environment ie psychosocial well-being. Egocentricity is confused by many - even educated intelligent people - as being appropriate self-care.
     Developmental psychologists and all wisdom traditions view egocentricity as an early (read primitive) stage of human development, something to outgrow NOT aspire to. The wise open-hearted allocentric attitude we choose to bring, moment-by-moment, to deal with whatever's on our plate is what's all-important. As someone recently said, 'Happiness is an inside job!'
     "It does not matter so much what we look at or touch or think, but it matters a lot how we respond to what we are experiencing. Every emotional response is a form of action, and every action has a consequence. We are shaped not so much by what we do, but by how we engage with what we do." Andrew Olendzki

Toronto, Ontario