Pondering

Theme for February: Resilience

Friday, February 26, 2021

It often occurs to me that living a good life has much to do with ‘pondering’. The word derives from an old Latin word that meant ‘weighing’, and there’s no doubt that I should spend a good deal of time engaged in that activity. The fact is, I’m almost always thinking, and I should do this important activity as if I am carefully studying each thought in order to estimate how much it ‘weighs’. When I think of life this way, I sometimes picture a laboratory balance scale. If I’m truly a serious student of life, I should more often practice pondering – placing a thought in one of the pans of the scale, then placing another thought in the opposite pan, and then checking the relative heaviness. It’s a precise, exact business, this process called thinking, or pondering, and, like weighing things in a laboratory, it requires the utmost attentiveness. Careless thinking, like careless weighing, always leads to flawed results. One thought might be just a milligram heavier than another, but that could be the difference between a transformative idea and a dud. I guess my life should, in a sense, be run like a meticulous laboratory. If I’m going to be weighing thoughts each day, there needs to be an atmosphere of concentration and precision in my days. I need to keep in mind that I’m engaged in scientific work of a high order – considering and evaluating thoughts. Perhaps, when I enter a new day – a new laboratory – I should imagine myself putting on a lab coat and magnifying glasses, ready to begin another session of the meticulous pondering of thoughts.

I spent some time this morning pondering wonderful thoughts as I did an attentive and spirited 3-mile walk at Elm Grove Cemetery. Here’s the route I took among the stately gravestones and solemn trees …

While walking and pondering, I saw these impressive scenes …

And very early this morning, at 4:55 a.m., as we were sitting in the sunroom doing our silent morning meditations, we saw the large, silent moon just above the trees …