Read the title.
Because it says a lot about our culture. This statement has to be shared over and over again, because its important. Yet it seems to fall on deaf ears, or is dropped, shattered on the floor like an old glass no one really cared for.
The catch is that we’re wired to never stop learning. We take in daily information that assists with our survival and well-being, we have to. We have evolved to continue to take in and process data. We, as mere mortal humans, take in the information and connect it with a million other pieces of information that we know. Making this endless web of knowledge linking to knowledge and knowledge creating ideas and perspectives and developing our world views.
Of course the other side of this is that we can often be wrong about our world views. We end up with skewed views and mis-information. Which often means we have to re-learn in order to be correct. Or, sadly, we stubbornly stick to our misunderstandings like a mule refusing to move for a train.
The train is truth, the mule is stubbornness….I think that makes sense?
My point is, we’re all wrong on a regular basis, and we owe the world, our friends, our neighbors, and the planet to continue to learn and adjust.
Maybe the better analogy is that we should adjust our sails as the wind changes. This doesn’t mean that we remove the sail and start over, it means that we move as things change. We take on new winds to our benefit….Ahem….meaning we learn how things are and we adjust.
Because the reality is, if we continue to be stubborn and not move, or not learn, is that we get run over or knocked away. We end up on an island we never wanted to be on, or smashed by a train.
So, I challenge all of you to look at your world, and look at how you think, and question it. Ask yourself, “am I right in this?” “Do I know what I am talking about?” and from there go and question it.
I’ll share my own example:
I stubbornly (I know….) believe in my own memory as being accurate for many things that have happened, in say just the last 8 years. The reality, as I am slowly remembering, is that the brain is terrible faulty when it comes to memory. Therefore, my memories are only about 60% accurate to what actually happened. Say the time I got confused and stranded by the bus schedules in Scotland, two days in a row. I REMEMBER not being able to get the right information, the reality is probably along the lines of not reading the schedules correctly, or asking the right questions.
Other things that have come up:
“cats eat grass to puke” the reality and probably more scientific answer is that cats like grass for digestion and cleaning their teeth.
“Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s mistress” well the term mistress is problematic when someone is owned by the other and about 14 years of age when their owner begins a relationship with them. Meaning: Sally Hemings was forced to have a sexual relationship and children with the man that legally owned her. That man was a founding father and president of the United States.
This brings up a lot of subjects, which I’ll address in another post, but the point is, we have to think about how we talk, feel, interact, react and share the world. We have to acknowledge our mistakes, and we have to learn new data.
This makes the world a better place and it means that we can be better beings to and with one another. We have to move out of this post-truth funk and fully acknowledge the importance of truth, knowledge, education and experts. Oh my lord, we must listen to and acknowledge experts.
Again, stay tuned for more….until next time, keep learning.
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