At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“Wisdom is before him that hath understanding; But the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth”
Proverbs 17:24
This is a proverb that encourages us to think that the wise thing for us to do is right there in front of us. Duties are rarely across the globe, but rather are to be found in the “next step.”
By the same token, the fool’s eyes are beyond the horizon.
A moment’s reflection should reveal why this is. If our duties are right in front of us, we can see what they actually are, and we are responsible to engage them. There they are—pick them up and go. In this scenario, our duties come to us from outside. They are assigned to us. We don’t make them up as we go.
But if we are playing the fool, and our eyes are darting back and forth, thousands of miles away, we are in a position to make up our duties, to fashion all our responsibilities to our liking, and to award ourselves with as many honors and awards as we can think of. In other words, we are set free to daydream. And all this daydreaming is detached from what is actually going on in the actual world.
Put another way, daydreaming grants us a measure of felt autonomy. When we look at the path of wisdom, however, there is no felt autonomy at all. There is the diaper to change. There is the report to write. There is the class to teach. We are summoned by the providence of God to do the next thing, which is an obvious thing. Moreover, it is an obvious thing that we are not in charge of, which is the principal reason it rubs us so wrong.
All things considered, we sometimes feel like we are lost, not knowing what we should do. But the real problem is that we do know what we should do, and we don’t really feel like it.
