"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
*** Isaac Newton English mathematician & physicist **
( with thanks to David Gurteen for his 'Quote of the Day' emails: www.gurteen.com )
What a wonderfully profound and humble thing to write. I I think know the feeling. When I feel I've got a handle on something, mastered a system or created some thinking model life tends to show me something else, more and more and more to learn.
So the image of the child with a single pebble or shell is a reassuring one. It's OK to deeply appreciate one small thing while there is still so much ahead. It puts a good scale on things. However useful a particular system, model or personality typing is it is still only a tiny fraction of what there is to be understood about life and about individual human beings. That, of course, doesn't devalue any individual nugget of knowledge, any more than the beach devalues the single pebble or shell.
What did Newton mean by saying he did not know how he appeared to the world?
I assume he did know, in part, that he was respected and that his findings were important. He's telling us that in his inner life it appeared different. He was aware of the vastness of what still remained to be discovered relative to his own work and that he was like a child playing with what was interesting to him.
He was also saying that he kept the sense of wonder that a child has, that one can imagine in the child in this photo of a child playing on the vast expanse of a Welsh beach, with the sea away in the distance.
Wonder, interest and a sense of proportion. Helpful things to keep in mind when acquiring and using knowledge.
How might wonder, interest and a sense of proportion help you when using specific thinking models, personality typings and specific bodies of knowledge and skill, such as NLP and Clean Facilitation?
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