That old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Oh, it is so true. We don’t know what is coming our way. We can only be sure of one thing, and that is the fact that we can’t be sure of anything.
Ask Thomas Beckett. Well. That’s impossible. He lived on this earth a long time ago. But back in the year 1173, on this very date of February 21, something big happened to good Tom.
Pope Alexander III canonized Thomas Becket, proclaiming him a saint.
Earlier in his life, Thomas was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. Yes, he was murdered by four knights of the King.
King Henry II to be exact. Thomas disagreed with King Henry about the rights of the church and the rights of the throne. And so it went. Those knights went into the monastery where Thomas worked and resided, used spears to cut off the top of his head, are removed his brains. To think about this is ghastly, horrible, and excruciating.
But I imagine, years before that, as an emerging monk and priest, Thomas probably wished that one day he would become the Archbishop of Canterbury. He probably even prayed for it, hoped for it, worked for it. And sometime later, it would be his demise.
Be careful what we wish for. As they say.
But how do we know? How do we tell if the thing we wish for might turn the wrong way, go in the wrong direction, or end up badly for us?
I suppose we don’t and cannot know.
All we can do is to do our best in every minute of the day. There are a lot of choices to be made in our lives, one way or the other. It is estimated that the average adult makes about 35,000 “remotely conscious” decisions each day.
This number can be increased exponentially if we include all the unconscious decisions we make, such as when we brush our teeth to “move the brush to the left, move the brush to the right, to the left, to the right.” In that way, our daily choices prove to be astronomical.
Each decision, of course, then carries certain consequences with it. And those consequences can be either good or bad. Maybe even both.
So, we do what is right in front of us.
We do the next right thing.
And wish for what we will.
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The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
— Socrates
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It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
— Henry David Thoreau
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The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.
— John Burroughs
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Wishes. Well?
