Welcome to the Our Moral Compass Podcast. Each daily reading focuses on a different quote on how we can best apply it to our own moral compass and one of the five areas in Social Emotional Learning: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Relationship Skills and Responsible Decision Making. Thank you for listening and we hope you consider subscribing to the podcast for future episodes.
We All Have Choices
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy…in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music.”
-John Adams
The choices and decisions we make in life whether we realize it or not affect our future generations. Today’s quote by President John Adams shows this in his explanation of him making the decision to study politics and war in order for the liberty his sons could have to study mathematics and philosophy which in turn gives their children the right to pursue their passions like painting poetry and music.
During John Adams’ time the colonies were fighting for their independence from England. Because of this John Adams made the decision to study politics in order to best support the birth of a new nation and its political journey towards independence and learning to govern themselves. He studied war to learn strategy to help formulate plans with the military leaders to overcome British rule. The beauty behind his thinking is that he not only focused on the present moment at hand but had the foresight to know by making this conscious decision to study politics and war what doorways or pathways that would be wide open for his children and his grandchildren. His decisions led to a sort of domino effect. A very positive one for that matter.
By his sons deciding to study mathematics and philosophy it increased their depth of knowledge and provided the necessary tools to further the growth of themselves and contribute to a young nation at the time. Their sacrifices, like President Adams, would open more doorways and pathways up for their children to pursue their passion and their creativity painting, poetry and music.
So the question is this: What has been your intentionality in making certain choices and decisions? Are you focusing on what this decision could mean in the moment happening right now or also considering its future affect on future generations to come? We need to make sure that our decisions are not rushed as they could have future implications for decisions that needs to be made by your children or your children’s children. When we look from this perspective we allow ourselves to look deeper into the long term affects of our decision making.
What does this quote mean to you and how can you apply today’s message towards developing your responsible decision making skills?
To subscribe to the podcast please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Music from https://filmmusic.io
“Relaxing Piano Music” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
A special thank you to Feedspot for recognizing the Our Moral Compass podcast as one of the Top 10 Social Emotional Learning Podcasts on the internet. It is an honor to be amongst the other podcasts on this list as we all strive to make this world a better place.
Becoming The Change 