”Flecks of Gold On a Path of Stone - Simple Truth’s for Profound Living” - Part Four Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

Common sense is a ‘common’ phrase that is in reality far from common.  To add insult to injury, common sense also seems to weigh in a trite bit light on ‘sense’ as well.  It might be proper to say that common sense is neither common nor does it make much sense anymore.  Today, common sense commonly lacks sense and we are the poorer for it.
It seems rather apparent that some things in life should simply ‘be’ without any thought about whether they should ‘be.’  We would define those as the common things.  If we tinker with the idea of “common” for a moment, it would imply something that just ‘is’ because it has a place in life that’s uncontested, blatantly obvious, globally useful, intrinsically beneficial and it’s as cleanly natural as sunshine and rose petals.  ‘Common’ defines those things whose existence we simply presume without questioning what they are or what role they play.  They just ‘are’ because they’re supposed to be and we accept them as such. 
 
Common Sense
It seems that common sense should be common as well, or at least we would like it to be common.  After all, when we apply common sense things usually come out pretty good.  Even if we can’t rightly define it, the phrase “common sense” has a nice ring to it.  There’s something soothing about the idea of “common sense” as it seems to have some reliable guiding quality to it that’s much more likely to insure a good outcome.  Common sense seems to bring a sure and steady compass to situations that are short on compasses.  It seems to be the thing that will not fail us when all the craftiness, shrewdness, cunning and presumed brilliance of men who presume themselves as brilliant fails.  Common sense is the spotless and orderly notion that we smile at with a kind of soothing and pleasantly simplistic agreement.
Common sense implies a cup of wisdom, a dash of discernment and a dollop of intellectual acumen that’s blended clean and translucent.  It’s clarity in chaos and focus when all else is frantic.  It suggests the direct application of life experience, gently hemmed in by intuition and held fast by reason.  Common sense is the best of our senses refusing to react to the worst of our fears.  It appears to be a culmination and consolidation of the best of our experiences that in combination are sufficiently adequate to overcome the worst of who we are.  
 
The Absence of Common Sense
The absence of common sense seems in large part to be related to the fact that we tack so much stuff on to it, or cut so much stuff out of it, or painfully contort it to the point that we’re not certain what we’re left with other than it’s probably nothing even remotely close to common sense.  We’re prone to nip, tuck, tinker and toy with it until it’s a whole lot less to common sense and a whole lot more something else.  Common sense then gets unrecognizably blurred or worse yet it gets entirely lost in our tinkering.
What’s problematic is that once we’ve done all of that stuff to common sense, we think that what’s left over is still common sense.  If fact, we often think that we’ve refined it to the point that it’s tight, clean and logically invincible.  In reality, common sense is lost to the point that we don’t even recognize that whatever we’ve got left over after messing with common sense, it’s probably anything but common sense.  We’ve got our own derivative of something that maybe started out as common sense but is only common in the fact that it no longer makes any sense.
But we go ahead and treat it like common sense anyway.  The obvious and natural progression is that we act on it thinking all the while that its common sense that we’re acting on.  The repercussions are that we end up acting on something that’s likely distorted by our agendas or shaped by whatever the cultural bias is.  The result is that we do incredibly stupid things while applauding ours