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My Kindle Highlights from Kent Nerburn’s Simple Truths: Clear & Gentle Guidance on the Big Issues in Life
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“Education is one of the great joys and solaces of life. It gives us a framework for understanding the world around us and a way to reach across time and space to touch the thoughts and feelings of others. But education is more than schooling. It is a cast of mind, a willingness to see the world with an endless sense of curiosity and wonder. If you want to be truly educated, you must adopt this cast of mind. You must open yourself to the richness of your everyday experience — to your own emotions, to the movements of the heavens and the languages of birds, to the privations and successes of people in other lands and other times, to the artistry in the hands of the mechanic and the typist and the child.”
“Confucius, who told his followers, ‘Study without thinking and you are blind; think without studying and you are in danger.’”
“School, if it is good, imparts knowledge and a context for understanding the world around us. It opens us to ideas that we could never discover on our own, and makes us one with the life of the mind as it has been shaped by people and cultures that we could never meet in our own experience. It makes us part of a community of learners, and helps us give form and direction to the endless flow of experience that passes before us.”
“…along with knowledge, you must seek wisdom. Knowledge is multiple; wisdom is singular. Knowledge is words; wisdom is silent. Knowledge is standing outside, understanding what is seen; wisdom is standing at the center, knowing what is not seen. No person can be whole without both dimensions of learning.”
“The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.”
“Choose your work carefully. No matter how much you might believe that your work is nothing more than what you do to make money, your work makes you who you are, because it is where you put your time. We are what we do, and the more we do it, the more we become it. By giving a job your time, you are giving it your consciousness. Eventually it will fill your life with the reality that it presents.”
“The way they deal with money is a result of how they think about money, not of how much money they have.”
“Money on its most basic level is a hard fact — either you have it or you don’t. But on its emotional and psychological level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.”
“He may be a millionaire, but if his fantasies run into the billions, in his own mind he is poor. Another person, who sees money as a simple tool for moving through life, will feel comfortable if she has a dollar more than she needs in her pocket, and positively rich if she has ten dollars more than she needs. She has not built her happiness around desires, so she does not have to measure her money against those desires. She simply has an extra dollar she can spend any way she wants. The difference between these two people does not lie in their actual wealth. It lies in their psychological relationship to money. They may have exactly the same amount of money — but one measures money against desires and the other measures it against needs.”
“People who measure their money against their desires will never be happy, because there will always be another desire waiting to lure them. People who measure their money against their needs can gain control over their lives by gaining control over their needs.”
“When you don’t have enough to survive, money becomes the centerpiece of your life because you are obsessed with its absence, and your heart very quickly fills with desperation and anger.”
“The world is full of desperate people. Even people who want to help can give only so much. They will not respond to more than they see. If they see a hungry man, they will try to feed him. If they see an angry man, they will try to avoid him. If they see a promising man, they will try to help him fulfill his promise. Show your promise, not your anger and desperation, and the hand of poverty will more readily release its grip on your life.”
“It is as important to know how to be poor as it is to know how to be rich.”
“Financial well-being is nothing more than a balancing act on the back of circumstance. You can be thrown off at any time. If you know how to be poor with dignity and grace, nothing short of massive financial disaster can disturb your peace of mind. Knowing how to be poor means developing an unerring instinct for the difference between what is essential and what is only desirable. It means knowing how to take control of your life — how to repair and maintain the things around you, how to purchase wisely and well, how not to purchase at all when you do not have the means to do so, and how to take joy in the simple pleasures in life. It means not getting caught up in what is lacking, but finding meaning in what you have.”
“Debt, not poverty, is the greatest enemy of financial well-being and peace of mind.”
“…debt defines your future, and when your future is defined, hope begins to die. You have committed your life to making money to pay for your past. Stay away from debt if you can. There is no sadder sight than the person with dreams and promise whose eyes have dulled and whose days are spent pushing the heavy wheel of debt toward an endless horizon.”
“Money tends to move away from those who try to hoard it, and toward those who share it.”
“Unaware of his prices, I went over to see him. I told him how much I had. I was five dollars short. ‘My price is my price,’ he said, and slammed the door. Now, when I drive by his house, I see his yard crammed with doghouses. His house is falling down. His life is mired in poverty. But he will not change his price. He has established a value in his own mind and no one shares that value. His life cannot go forward until he frees himself from his conviction that he cannot take a loss. He will die surrounded by his doghouses, and they will be sold for five dollars apiece at a yard sale. Learn from the old man. He is fixated on the doghouses, not on what they will enable him to do.”
“We must always remember that possessions have no inherent value. They become what we make them. If they increase our capacity to give, they become something good. If they increase our focus on ourselves and become standards by which we measure other people, they become something bad.”
“And when the objects accumulate, do what you must to free yourself from their false importance. Give away what you don’t use. Go on a long trip and travel lightly. Find a possession you value highly and give it to someone who would value it more. Do something to remind yourself that most of your possessions are nothing more than unimportant decorations on who you really are.”
“Listen to the quiet wisdom that says you will value your possessions more if you have fewer of them, and that you will find deeper meaning in human sharing than in the accumulation of goods.”
“…true giving is not an economic exchange; it is a generative act. It does not subtract from what we have; it multiplies the effect we can have in the world.”
“Many people don’t want to be travelers. They would rather be tourists, flitting over the surface of other people’s lives while never really leaving their own. They try to bring their world with them wherever they go, or try to recreate the world they left. They do not want to risk the security of their own understanding and see how small and limited their experiences really are. To be a real traveler, you must be willing to give yourself over to the moment and take yourself out of the center of your universe. You must believe totally in the lives of the people and the places where you find yourself.”
“We will die with work undone. The labors of life are endless. Better that you should accept the rhythms of life and know that there are times when you need to stop to draw a breath, no matter how great the labors are before you.”
“Solitude is a condition of peace that stands in direct opposition to loneliness. Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union.”
“How you deal with love is how love will deal with you, and all our hearts feel the same pains and joys, even if our lives and ways are very different.”
“The central secret seems to be choosing well. There is something to the claim of fundamental compatibility. Good people can create a bad relationship, even though they both dearly want the relationship to succeed. It is important to find someone with whom you can create a good relationship from the outset.”
“Unfortunately, it is hard to see clearly in the early stages of a relationship. Sexual attraction blinds you to the thousands of little things by which relationships eventually survive or fail. You need to find a way to see beyond this initial overwhelming physical fascination.”
“Laughter is one clue to compatibility. It tells you how much you will enjoy each other’s company over the long term. If your laughter together is good and healthy, and not at the expense of others, then you have a healthy relationship to the world.”
“Laughter is the child of surprise. If you can make each other laugh, you can always surprise each other. If you can always surprise each other, you can always keep the world around you new.”
“Beware of a relationship in which there is no laughter. Even the most intimate relationships, if based only on seriousness, have a tendency to turn dour.”
“We each have a different kind of strength. Some of us are able to persevere against hopeless odds. Some are able to see light in a world of darkness. Some are able to give selflessly with no thought of return, while others are able to bring a sense of importance into the hearts of those around them. But no matter how we exhibit strength, its truest measure is the calm and certain conviction with which it causes us to act. It is the ability to discern the path with heart, and follow it even when at the moment we might wish to be doing something else.”
“True strength is not about force, but about conviction. It lives at the center of belief where fear and uncertainty cannot gain a foothold.”
“…strength based in force is a strength people fear. Strength based in love is a strength people crave.”
“Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu spoke about when he said, ‘A frog in a well cannot be talked to about the sea.’”
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