Random Musings. . .by Kui Gathua

“ It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. ” ~Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. A teacher once asked his class to solve the following problem: ‘Ramu worked at a butcher’s shop. His height was 5 feet, 6 inches. His waist was 36 inches. He worked 10 hours a day and earned 50 rupees per day. What did he weigh?’   Everyone started calculating Ramu’s weight by multiplying, dividing, adding, subtracting and finding relation between all the digits. Then a guy stood up and said, “Sir, he weighed meat.”   “Ahhhh!” We all sighed. The question was not ‘what was his weight’, it was ‘what did he weigh’! Effective listening, a more active form of listening, is a process that goes beyond simply hearing. While you hear with your ears, you listen with your entire body, including your ears, eyes, heart and brain. It has to do with the other person’s words, tonality and body language – how the words are spoken and in the context in which you ...

  “ Lemons clean everything. It’s the greatest disinfectant. ” ~ Sandra Bullock A lemon is a widely cultivated, bitter fruit with a wide variety of uses for its juice, rind and pulp. Lemons give flavour to baked goods, sauces, drinks and desserts but are rarely consumed alone due to their intense sour taste. The acid content in lemons makes them good as a short term preservative in a variety of dishes. We recently had a couple of birthdays to celebrate and this time I decided to make a lemon pound cake. I’m glad to report I have a winner and may be coming back to this recipe despite my chronic experimentation tendencies. And hence, everything lemon got me musing about the “got lemons, make lemonade” adage. It’s been lemon season with a bang in the lives of many people for the last 15 months. And sadly, the lemons keep coming, juicier and sourer. Too much of anything is poison and familiarity breeds contempt so of course lemonade is no longer a tolerable drink! So what to do...

  “ A healthy body attends to the pain of the weakest part .”Paul Brand Recently I experienced debilitating back pain seemingly from nowhere. After a few minutes of contemplating my options with the sole aim of getting rid of the pain as fast as possible, I took a deep breath and sat down slowly. From what I know, pain is a messenger not the message; a signal or a sign pointing the way to a cause, not the destination. So I had some searching or clue following to do. Indeed my clues led me to an emotional issue I was trying to push down because it was too overwhelming to deal with at the time, or so I thought. In my efforts to push the stressor out of my consciousness, it got pushed alright! And it settled on my back where it was now paralysing me with pain and I could not move. Since I was now a captive audience for my emotions, I had a choice to make. Face it and deal with it or pop a pain killer and postpone it to a later date. Unfortunately, the second option would have requ...

  “ It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are. ”- Roy E. Disney Once a man unearthed in his field a marble statue of great beauty. And he took it to a collector who loved all beautiful things and offered it to him for sale, and the collector bought it for a large price. And they parted. And as the man walked home with his money he thought, and he said to himself, “How much life this money means! How can anyone give all this for a dead carved stone buried and undreamed of in the earth for a thousand years?” And now the collector was looking at his statue, and he was thinking, and he said to himself, “What beauty! What life! The dream of what a soul! – and fresh with the sweet sleep of a thousand years. How can anyone give all this for money, dead and dreamless?” ~The Forerunner: His Parables and Poems by Kahlil Gibran (1920) The free dictionary offers a number of definitions for ‘value’- the worth in usefulness or importance to the possessor; util...