Take a quotation . . . #1

I decided I'd try something a little different. Now that is usually the point at which I find my originality is in fact old hat, out of date, been done to death a thousand times. After all, 'There's nothing new under the sun'. Notwithstanding, my thought was to take a quotation at random and use it as a prompt for thought, a pondering point.

I would open a book of quotations – or any book – and see what caught my eye. I picked up 'The Prophet' by Kahlil Gibran and found the following:

'Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.'

I liked the imagery of a 'seafaring soul' following a journey perhaps uncharted were it not for the rudder of reason holding fast to a course. To continue the voyage with obstinate determination might be detrimental or dangerous or foolhardy without the sails of passion to temper inflexibility. In modern terms we speak of the heart ruling the head or vice versa, the unspoken wisdom being that emotion should not be allowed to dictate action. If humans were always to follow this course where would compassion lie? It is necessary to be practical but it is also essential to have emotion or humans would be little different to robots.

Kahlil Gibran argues this so much more cogently!