What’s a skill you consider basic, that most people don’t actually know how to do?
✨The Wise Path ✨
To know and act — that is the wise way.
To know, yet not — the fool’s delay.
Life asks if wisdom or folly reigns —
The choice is yours alone to claim.
Close your eyes, yet open wide
The door within — let fear subside.
Through forms that fade, the unseen gleams —
The heart perceives what sight but dreams.
To know true wisdom, first see clearly —
Yourself in others, others here.
This is the start, the end of strife —
The quiet birth of peaceful life.
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Living in the digital age, we think we know everything. But do we really?
Consider the basics: many city dwellers can’t boil an egg or fry bacon—not an unusual phenomenon in urban life. People are either too busy to cook or find it easier to buy prepared food. There’s no pressing need to acquire skills like cooking.
The same goes for swimming. Many young people never learn—perhaps because staying in an air-conditioned room with video games feels far more appealing than braving the scorching heat.
Today, hands-on know-how, or DIY, seems remote to those who gravitate towards high-tech solutions rather than traditional soft skills—which are time-consuming, if not difficult to master.
Traditional wisdom advises us to think ahead and prepare for a rainy day. Life’s changes can arrive without warning, leaving no time to study or rehearse for contingencies. Whether it’s survival techniques or plans for surprises, the rule of thumb remains: dwell in safety, yet fear harm. Be ready—as individuals and as organisations.
But skills are not merely technical know-how. Their successful application depends on the appropriate use of soft skills—the kind that come from the heart.
Take the patient I visited this morning. She was bed-bound and unable to walk. Every time she needed to relieve herself, she did so on a pad wrapped around her lower back. The hospital’s schedule for changing pads was every four hours—but her body’s needs didn’t always align with the clock. Sometimes she lay in her own waste for an hour or two before being cleaned. One can only imagine the physical discomfort and the humiliation to her dignity.
Generally, the hospital’s system of patient care works well. But when specific needs arise, contingency support—prompt attention for urgent situations—could have spared my patient much of her post-surgery pain and the indignity of poor sanitation. As the saying goes, only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. Her experience reminded me, once again, of the need to walk in another’s shoes—a basic skill for any care service.
So, while I dwell in safety, I long for peace for others. That is the way to sustain peace together over time. Life changes, yet all things can work together for the good of all—despite challenges. For those with love, though danger looms, a hidden safety still remains in sight.
Today’s prompt asks us to name a basic skill most people don’t have a clue about. I’d rather reframe the question: What’s a basic skill I don’t actually know? There are many. But the one I can’t live without is the skill of showing love to others—gentle to my heart, yet firm in my hands. Only when I practice it does true wisdom prevail: first seeing clearly myself in others, and others seeing themselves in me.
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en yan hua fang 