Our Greatest Personal Achievement

Our greatest personal achievement is having the ability to change, not through knowing about lots of things, but by understanding, which goes much deeper. Profound understanding transforms our being, while mere information only fills our memory. When we understand, we become a different person, while learning to live with our old brain, our old self.

The problem is that, if we don’t change, we’re stuck with the old ideas that we carry around. To truly understand, we have to drop these concepts and see afresh in the spontaneous now. Isn’t solving a problem satisfying?

Through realisation, wisdom rewires the way in which we perceive the world, effectively growing beyond our old selves, while still appreciating where we began.

And so we start again, reincarnating moment by moment, with a little residue from our past. Every single breath is a clean slate, yet we always carry the echoes of where we’ve been, and our accumulated wisdom shapes how we step into the next moment.

That echo, that residue, is the foundation of empathy.