“The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause” -Ralph Waldo Emerson.
This saying simply means this: those treasured most by the industrious people of the world are those who’ll applaud their actions most by simply helping or stepping out of the way. The loudest support is ironically from the person making the least amount of fuss when it comes to cooperating with progress.
And we all have a role in this very simple undertaking. To recognise a good thing for what it is and simply allow it to happen (if that’s the flow of things) and even facilitate same if there’s the slightest opportunity.
Yet, we can build barriers to progress even in our wholehearted support—when it’s just noise at the end of the day you have to wonder the meaning of action that has no designed merit about it.
Some people, however, hate merit. They hate the fact that some people are bent on making the world better simply by doing what they can do. We find these people working mainly in the bureaucracies where they may simply hide when work’s to be done, only then to reappear vociferously when progress threatens to move.
It’s like the person who insists on beating their chest whenever ‘the new thing’ is mooted. They see an opportunity to affect destiny in an outspoken way either positively or negatively and make some sort of name for themselves in that new thing. I believe that’s called ‘jumping on the bandwagon.’
Imagine the wonder, though, in a highly praiseworthy action that is so simple to do it requires no action; in a word, inaction. The silence that keeps the lid of bureaucracy tightly in place is the friend to action in this urgent world we live in; not dodgy action, but good efficacious action that means positive results.
© S. J. Wickham, 2009.
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