Today is November 28 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you remind yourself that effort and experience are the true teachers?”
People who navigate the chaos understand that the amount of effort they can apply, when coupled with their ability to reflect upon experiences, are the two elements completely in their control.
American author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
In the 1830s Emerson gave lectures that he afterward published in essay form.
These essays, particularly “Nature” (1836), embodied his newly developed philosophy. “The American Scholar,” based on a lecture that he gave in 1837, encouraged American authors to find their own style instead of imitating their foreign predecessors. Emerson became known as the central figure of his literary and philosophical group known as the American Transcendentalists.
These writers shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition.
The 1840s were productive years for Emerson. He founded and co-edited the literary magazine The Dial, and he published two volumes of essays in 1841 and 1844. Some of the essays, including “Self-Reliance,” “Friendship” and “Experience,” number among his best-known works.
How often do you remind yourself that effort and experience are the true teachers?