Friday, August 25th, 2006
Cats Have It All Figured Out
Read the entire series here
I know this sounds somewhat flaky, but cats do have it all figured out. They know exactly where they are, and they know exactly where they are going. Cats know exactly what their purpose is in life: being cuddled as much as possible. And if that’s not enough, they have nine lives and they always land on their feet!
For us, life is somewhat more complex. Few of us know where they stand in life, and even fewer know where they are going. And with this ignorance by choice, it’s no wonder that so many of us sense that something is just not working right. And we still have no clue what it is.
Not that it is really our fault, is it? How can we make sense of our life when we constantly have to juggle between work, family, friends, hobbies, some more work, the house chores, and maybe just a little more work? How on earth can we possibly know where we stand in this hectic reality?
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an airplane’s cockpit, but you must have seen one in movies. The amazing thing about an airplane’s cockpit is the surprisingly narrow view of the external world the pilot has through the front window.
Imagine flying a 30-ton machine, controlling it, navigating it, being responsible for the lives of hundreds of people, and doing so while being able to see only a fragment of what’s going on in the external world. A pilot cannot see the airplane’s wings. He cannot see whether the wheels came down or not. He is not able to visually verify that all engines are working. In many cases he flies over endless oceans, so what he sees through this narrow window doesn’t really help him get a notion of the plane’s geographical position.
The secret lies in the second overwhelming thing in an airplane’s cockpit: the amount of controls and gauges. When you enter the cockpit, you cannot remain indifferent to the richness of lights, numbers, and sounds – all designed for the sole purpose of enabling the pilot to get a sense of the real status of the plane.
This vast amount of information seems unmanageable at first, but without it there is no chance in the world the plane will safely arrive from one point to another. The pilot must have a clear picture of the external world, the status of the airplane, and last but not least, how they relate to one another. His control panel helps the pilot create this picture in his mind.
In our everyday lives, we tend to move forward blindly. It’s not that we are not aware of the reality around us, but we see only a fragment of it – we are looking through our cockpit’s front window. We are running forward without halting for even one minute to check where we are positioned in our lives. Imagine what would happened had the pilot ignored the gyroscope, which tells him whether the airplane is balanced or not. Imagine what would have happened had the pilot trusted only what he sees through the front window of his cockpit. That’s exactly what we are doing in our personal lives.
What we need is a control panel – a set of gauges that will help us understand where we are. Based on this data we can decide where we are going and how to get there. Unlike the airplane’s control panel, though, our personal control panel will not provide us any useful data without our help. The data will not just be there for us to use.
In the next post, we will start building and using our personal control panel. Until then, stop for a minute and think what you might be missing by trying to navigate through life one day at a time, responding only to what you see through your front window.