Today we are recording our podcast/journal from our studio in The Big House in Marietta, Ohio. It has been a beautiful, but slightly warm week for mid-spring in Ohio and it sure makes me want to be outside on a trek myself. Growing up on an apple orchard and small farm, even after working indoors most of my adult life, I still yearn to be outside, working in the dirt, and enjoying nature. (See About Wisdom-Trek.)
We are continuing today to consider what tools or equipment that we need to have in order to ensure and enjoy our Wisdom-Trek. Yesterday, on Day 2 we looked at the core, or fundamental tool of love, which encapsulates all of the remaining eight tools that we will consider.
While the podcast that you listen to each day will be very similar in nature to the journal entries, you may want to review the journal entries also as they include pictures, “tweet-able” sayings and free downloadable PDF documents (tools) that will be helpful along our journey. You can access those tools from the Free Resources page on Wisdom-Trek.com
On day 2, I challenged you to visualize your life as a wheel, with love being the hub of that wheel and the remaining tools or attributes as the spokes stemming from a perfectly round hub. If you have not listened to the previous episodes, day 0 through day 2, I would encourage you to listen to those podcasts or read my journal entries for those days.
Another analogy that I used was that we need to consider that the attribute of love in our lives is like our backpack on our trek that contains all the other tools or equipment needed for a successful Wisdom-Trek. The backpack is an essential component, for without a backpack the trek of life would be much more difficult.
The remaining spokes in our wheel (tools in our backpack) are joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Joy is a deep, abiding, internal sense of satisfaction, even when all conditions are not perfect, and life at times is out of our control. Unlike happiness, which is based on happenstances(or what happens around us), joy should remain during the tough times of life.
We can be sad about a situation/circumstance, but still maintain that deep sense of joy. To grow in wisdom is to realize that while circumstances can impact our happiness, our true internal joy is not impacted. To be a wise person we need to understand that sometimes life is rough and not everything turns out how we envisioned it.
Paula, my wonderful bride of nearly 36 years, and I have been through some deep valleys in both business and family issues, but we have also been able to experience some glorious summits in life. We will disappoint ourselves at times, and family or friends may disappoint us – this is a given…a fact of life. If we have...
