What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.
Interpretation
A child's independent actions reveal their true character and personality.
This quote emphasizes the idea that the actions a child chooses to take when they are not being instructed provide deep insights into their true nature and individuality. It suggests that freedom to act on their own allows children to express their values, preferences, and potential, highlighting the importance of autonomy in their development.
In practice
In a parenting workshop to illustrate the importance of independent play.
The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as βChristiansβ will become disciples β students, apprentices, practitioners β of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.
The first act of love is always the giving of attention.
So many people would like to have guidance from God because obviously, if you have a word from God, it's the best possible thing. But they don't relate that to life as a whole. Often they want guidance as a way of opting out of the responsibility of making decisions.
What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.
The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.
Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.
Coaching is the great passion of my life, and the job to me has always been an opportunity to work with our student athletes and help them discover what they want.
Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.
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