11/14/2025
FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION
One of the most challenging teachings when working with leaders of organizations or elite athletes (anyone in reality) is this: your results in life are not up to you.
Recently I drove from Canada’s east coast to my old stomping grounds in Toronto, Ontario. Part work and part other obligations and plans beckoned.
But life and its Creator had other plans.
Immediately upon arrival in Toronto I ran ten km, part of my training for an upcoming, 50 mile, ultramarathon. Felt great!
But here’s where my plans quickly became subservient to other-grander?-plans.
Overnight all hell broke loose. Sleepless and very ill I drove myself to the hospital, and within four hours I was on an operating table to repair a ruptured appendix and sepsis.
Six days later I emerged from hospital free of both. A strange shot of energy arose after my escape, so I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving running up Blue Mountain and its beautiful trails in Collingwood, Ontario, a few hours north of Toronto.
So what does ancient wisdom instruct? Life is funny, weird, unpredictable and beautiful and has its own mysterious “algorithm” that ensures a whole world.
It is wise to make plans, but hold on to outcomes lightly because they are subject to change depending on what the whole needs.
To manage that unpredictability, universal values are required to avoid resisting life as it is-and not as we wish it.
Among them are acceptance, accommodation and dispassion (all require far more definition than offers here).
By all means make plans: but it might be worthwhile first to know how life works, what its plans are, through the study and practice of self knowledge-to know what it means to be fully human.
THIS PRECIOUS LIFE
The other reminder I received was this: life is precious. Just the chance to breathe, to witness nature, to touch a blade of grass, to tap the trunk of a tree while running past it, to hear children squeal in delight and see parents’ smile, to see dogs run after sticks and stones, these are the priceless riches in life.
Value yourself. Value others.
Learn the ways of a life in harmony with how it all works.
Peter Bromley
Applied wisdom for works in progress