The king and the Smart man

I had once more been asked by my friend @brittandjosie to participate in another contest. Its not about winning. Its about sharing my story.

Today, I am going to share what have I always been praying for so long. The longing that I always hope god will continuously be blessing me throughout my life: wisdom. The strength, the ability to be always wise in my life, on how I deal with others and on other things that pertains to me.

Recently, I met a friend while I was running errands. While I am very much delighted to see how my friend is going, a part of me wanted felt sorry on how things are in her life. She had made a lot of choices that made her life very challenging.

I believe that most of us had been in a situation wherein what we thought would be a wise or reasonable decision but would turn out to be the wrong one. The thing is, there will always be no right or wrong choice overtime. Its about discerning when things are bad and finding ways to get out of that situation.

I felt sorry for my friend. But I also feel that being logical is not enough to ensure that her decisions were right.

When I was younger, people kept saying that being intelligent is synonymous to being wise. Finishing a degree in philosophy, going to college, having doctorals- the list goes on and on. There was even a time when Intelligence quotient was suddenly equated to being wise or smart.

For me, intelligence is just the ability of a person to reason- to figure out which ones is logical or not. Let me share a story:

There was once a very intelligent man. His reputation preceeds him as even wise men from other lands visit him to ask for help on difficult decisions. As a result, this man developed pride, confidence and pleasure on telling others that they are wrong in their decisions. One day, a king visited him and asked to be taught how to play chess. Chess is a game of strategy and logic. In order to win a game, one should be cunning, skilled and logical enough. At the end of the game when the king was supposed to be capturing one of the man's pieces, he called him out as the king's move would cause him to lose more important chess pieces- resulting on the king losing the game. It turned out that the king is ill tempered and hates being told that he is wrong. He turned on the man and had him executed for telling him that.

Moral lesson of the story:

Being wise does not always mean proving you're right, smart or better than others. On the case of the intelligent man, he would have been able to live longer if he was able to control his impulse on telling the king that he is wrong.

Wisdom might be simple things like, knowing when to speak up, when to say no, when to stop or simply walking away.

Reflecting on my chance encounter with my friend, I have never really appreciated all the choices I made in the past but, I am now. It dawned on me that in the past, I had been very wise in my decisions and choices in life.

It brought me to where I am. I hope it will help me have a peaceful, happy and comfortable life.