Browsing or Chewing Cud

Browsing is something I do every morning.  I browse through Holy Writ, I browse through the news of the day, I browse through a book that may peak my interest and I browse through my binders of “Quotes of Note.”  I browse through my yesterdays by reading my journals or my travel notebooks.  Browsing is a profitable exercise for my soul and I highly recommend it to all.  

To browse is to scan through a collection of data, to inspect it leisurely, casually, and randomly.  Of course there is another meaning for the word “browse” and it is used for animals who graze,  feeding on leaves, young shoots and plants.  Perhaps “grazing” is a better word for what I do each morning than the word browse.  Synonyms for browsing include words like: to look around and about, window shop, ruminate, ponder and peruse, or for the word ‘grazing” one might use words like feed, eat, or nibble.

My nibbling this morning has led me to several “Quotes of Note” that seem worthy of sharing.  Chewing cud is something some animals do.  Cud is produced during the digestive process of rumination, and in simple terms, a way of re-tasting what has been grazed .  So my nibbling each morning, wherever I graze, continues through the day as I chew my cud, so to speak.

I’ll be chewing the following over and over again today.

“An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizon of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.  And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self.  And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness.  They end up victims of distorted and disrupted personality.”  (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

“There are those who never see anything except in relation to themselves, nor that relationship as fancied by themselves; and this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing drier, and older, and smaller, and deader, the longer they live—thinking less of other people, and more of themselves and thir…experinece, all the time they go on withering.”  (George MacDonald)

By the way, “cud chewing is often used as an indicator of a healthy and comfortable cow.  A healthy animal will produce more milk or have a higher production of muscle than those who do not chew their cud properly.”