How very true is this? How many of us have said I'm going to be a happier person, I'm going to be more spiritual/ religious, I'm going to be more financially responsible. We read books on topic, come up with grand ideas but we never DO anything. The problem is this desire to make changes stay in cerebral realm. We think, think, and think, but we never do.

As quote points out, it may be easier to achieve major life changes by using action not by pondering, wondering, or studying. It's "fake it until you make it" philosophy. If you want to be a happier person, act like a happy person. Start smiling and being nice to people even if you don't feel like. If you want to be more financially responsible, start acting like a financially responsible person. Start forcing yourself to put money away every paycheck (even if it's as small at $10 or $20), freeze your credit cards to stop using them. If you want to be more spiritual/ religious start going to church on a regular basis, praying everyday or reading Bible. The point is to start behaving like person you want to become even if you aren't sincere and actions seem forced. Your mind will eventually catch up with your actions.

This riddle stumped us for days. Like with all riddles, its answer revealed a basic component of life we often take for granted. The answer was "Nothing".

In this harried life, we are all in a frenzy to have more, do more, say more, be more. We don't take time to stop and appreciate value of nothing. We would all benefit from learning value of doing nothing, saying nothing, and feeling nothing.

The Value of Doing Nothing. To say that we are all very busy is a gross understatement. People work hard to squeeze as much as possible into every minute of every day. Even our children are overwhelmed with school and sports and music lessons and play dates and so on and so on. It is not often that we stop and bask in a few moments of nothing. Try it: take 5 - 15 minutes one day to unload and unwind. Allow yourself to be free to think of nothing and do nothing. Recognize there is a big difference between doing nothing of watching TV some part of you is still engaged) and doing nothing of sitting in a dark quiet room alone with your thoughts. It is like working on an older computer when you have 5 - 10 applications open. You are jumping between applications, sharing data, saving information, using more and more of computers resources. On many older machines, all of this activity would eventually overwhelm computer’s memory, applications would start to lock up and you would be forced to reboot. That's what spending time doing nothing is about, forcing yourself to periodically reboot.