-
Mark David Gerson
a book bubble about
The Way of the Fool
Self-Help
Author Insight
Step #10: Embrace the Mystery
Funny thing about this books's Step #10: The Way of the Fool was the first of my 16 books to not demand that I "embrace the mystery" while writing it. ••• You see, with all my other books I began writing with only the vaguest sense of what they would be about. I never planned, plotted or outlined. The Way of the Fool was different. The idea for the book came to me nearly fully formed: I knew the title, I knew how the book would be structured and I had a pretty clear sense of the content. As a result here was no mystery to embrace, to surrender to or to unravel. Sure, there were things I discovered along the way...like that 12½th step! But knowing so much so clearly at the outset was probably why the book wrote itself in record time: precisely 10 weeks from the moment of conception to the day of publication. ••• Yet even I if was spared Step #10 while writing the The Way of the Fool, I have been called to "embrace the mystery" countless times in my life. I have also lived each of The Way of the Fool's other 11½ steps multiple times over the years. Hell, I've lived all 12½ of them this week, including #10!
Book Excerpt
The Way of the Fool
It’s human nature to want to understand, to want to figure out, to want to know. Some of our greatest scientific discoveries have come from that innate curiosity about how the world works.
Yet there is a difference between “wanting to know,” which derives from a healthy spirit of inquiry, and “needing to know,” which too often demonstrates a lack of trust.
When we are fixated on a “need” to know, what we are truly doing is craving control. “If I know what’s going on and why it’s going on, everything will make sense, I will be in control and I will be safe.”
Yet some of our most transformative advances and profound breakthroughs have occurred when an absolute need for certainty is abandoned in favor of the freedom of open-ended exploration…when we turn away from the common sense of the well-trodden path and step into the uncommon wisdom of the road less traveled…when we stop asking “why” (and insist on an answer that makes sense) and start asking “what if”?
What if we could stop insisting that our world make sense to our logical minds? What if we could surrender instead to “heart sense”? What if we could give up the need to know without losing our natural inquisitiveness? What if we could abandon control? What if, like the Fool, we could leap in faith?
What if?
Amazon
Barnes&Noble
GooglePlay
Apple Books
IndieBound
Kobo
Click Follow to receive emails when this author adds content on Bublish
Comment on this Bubble
Your comment and a link to this bubble will also appear in your Facebook feed.