To Resolve to Think – Sunday, January 02, 1944
The New Year brings with it the annually recurring question, to resolve or not to resolve. No doubt some of us have quit making resolutions, and some of us are still making and breaking them. Too often resolutions that wait for the New Year, and which are made dramatically with the ringing of the bells, play out undramaticallv and ingloriously. Usually the resolutions that stay with us are those we make quietly and earnestly to ourselves when we feel the strength and the need to do so— without waiting for a great occasion. And so we are not calling for any overt or declamatory resolutions, but we could, all of us, use some quiet personal determination about many things—one of which could be the resolve in the year ahead to do our own thinking—to cut through the maze of misinformation and ready-made opinion and look for the facts and the reasons behind the facts.
Too many of us live our lives by default. We let events take their course and let circumstances make our decisions for us, and allow our minds to feed upon pat and palatable opinions that someone else has proffered. We become involved in routines and go through motions which make us think we are going somewhere, but we couldn’t say exactly where. It reminds us of the story of our childhood, in which the Red Queen sagely observed: “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”* And so it seems, in our preoccupation with fevered pursuits, and unthinking acceptance of ready-made ideas.
If we could keep men moving so fast they wouldn’t have time to think, concern for the larger problems of life and the sharpness of reality could be dulled—dulled by the opiates of speed and exhaustion. But there are times when the pace inevitably slows down to admit of quiet thoughtfulness—and then reality becomes acutely insistent. And so a good resolve would be the resolve to think—to think back to causes and to think through to the probable effects of any given course—the resolve not to be content to feed our minds upon synthetic thoughts prepared for the consumption of the unthinking. This year, like all others, will pass surprisingly soon. It will hold both good things and disappointment—and, as always, much that we have worried about, won’t happen. It will add one more year to the lives of all of us, and will bring us one year nearer the ultimate purposes of an all-wise Providence. In the meantime, may we so live that there will be more careful thinking, fewer regrets, less fear of the unknown, and more faith in the future.
By Richard L. Evans, spoken from the Tabernacle, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Sunday, Jan. 2. 1944, over Radio Station KSL and the nationwide Columbia Broadcasting System. Copyright – 1944.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
January 02, 1944
Broadcast Number 0,750