week, a friend said something to me that brought me up short. Frankly, I didn’t know whether he meant it as a compliment or as a criticism.

What he said was, "The trouble with those mini-essays that you do on radio [and now over the Internet] is that they go directly to the heart of the matter involved. So they don’t give the rest of us a chance to argue about them."

Now if what he said is true, then it looks like there are a lot of folks out there who'd rather talk than think.

Maybe that’s because talking is easy and thinking is hard work. As Sir Joshua Reynolds put it: Man will resort to any expedient to avoid the real labor of thinking.

You know, there’s something in the Bible that comes to mind at the moment.

It’s Chapter 4, verse 7, of the Book of Proverbs: "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding." Understanding, in this context, being synonymous with "insight" or "enlightenment."

Now understanding doesn’t come from talking. It comes from thinking.

Indeed, as metaphysicians down through the centuries have put it, TRUTH lies within, not without. And that’s why I close each essay with a suggestion that you think about it. I could just as easily suggest that you talk about it.

By the way, it was not my intent to imply in the foregoing that I have a corner on understanding. Or that my mini-essays exude wisdom. Far from it.

As a matter of fact, whenever someone suggests that I always have THE ANSWER, I quickly let him or her know that the reason my hair and beard are gray is that I’ve done so many stupid things in my life.

But I’ve learned from them.

And it’s precisely what I’ve learned that goes into my mini-essays.

Think about it.