What’s most important?
Elizabeth Hamilton has written an intriguing short book, Untrain Your Parrot.
I have read the question she asked in Chapter 1 before about what’s most important. Yet, I appreciated her phrasing and broader perspective:
If you died today, would your obituary reflect your professed values? Or entropy: “She let the important things slide, and then she died.” The obituary question invites us to reflect on whether the things we consider most important are echoed in our use of time, money, and energy.
The question isn’t just “What’s important to me?” — which is likely to veer toward self-centered responses; it’s “What’s most important, from an all-encompassing, life-centered, or reality-centered perspective?” After all, life is life-centered rather than self-centered, unlike people.
Photo Credit: Wild Parrot by http://flickr.com/photos/red_devil/210567143/
Hi, David,
Perhaps asking another question first, “Why am I on the planet?” can inform one’s responses to the next, “What’s important to me?” This inquiry, when done consciously, reflectively, often moves one away from an ego-center perspective to a greater “we” perspective and even toward the notion of interconnectedness.
Peter,
I like the notion and question of thinking larger. I would suggest even that instead of thinking what’s important to me we could be thinking what’s important to “we.”