I like wisdom as much as the next sage. And though my following is perhaps not as large as Jesus or The Buddha, I still scatter my precious insights freely as befits a man of god, or gods, or no god at all, and if someone should find this wisdom in the dirt, and polish it off, and exclaim in epiphany, well, I have already exceeded my dreams. Or matched them. Or managed to chisel a fragment off of the great block of it.
Anyway, the wisdom I have for you today is about wisdom itself!
Wisdom is beautiful stuff, and a guiding light, but it doesn't entirely belong to the same universe we actually live in.
My case in point comes from a recent proverb I have been considering:
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
After thirty years working at a library, I would like to share with you something of my experience of this quote as it functions in the actual world. And if much of the beautiful wisdom seems drained out of it in this rendition, transplanted as it is to our regular old grimy world, might I suggest that the only real wisdom is in seeing things fully.
And so...
Do something for a man at the library, and one of his tasks is accomplished, teach a man to do something at the library, and he will return to have you teach it to him over and over again.
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