Didn‘t quite make it as far as I wanted to by the end of National Book Lovers Day yesterday because I‘ve been getting pretty sick due to some chronic illness flare up symptoms that remain unresolved, but it felt good to set the intention to spend a long time reading and actually NOT have the attention span of a squirrel on crack and getting pretty close to the end of this one.
Hoping to marathon it to the finish in daylight hours!!
And yet, in this rapidly evolving world, that is often what is called for. And so it is one of life‘s ironic truths that, though we love to be right, we are better off if sometimes people tell us we are wrong.
As we experience the world, we learn useful facts and valuable lessons and we form a point of view. Over time, we add to and adjust that point of view, much as we might add on to or update our house over the years. But just as we‘d hesitate to add a contemporary wing to an old Victorian home, we resist making changes of our worldview if those changes don‘t seem in harmony with what is already there.
Was just discussing this recently in regards to hiring people with disabilities!!
Even if you‘re not consciously open to considering opposing points of view, with a little exposure, they can affect your thinking.
“…what we know can put a constraint on the possibilities we can imagine.”
The lesson is that by letting go of our fixed ways, we can accomplish goals we might never thought possible.
In life, once on a path, we tend to follow it, for better or worse. What‘s sad is that if it‘s the latter, we often accept it anyway—not because we‘re afraid of change, but because by then we‘re so accustomed to the way things are that we don‘t even recognize that they could be different.
History—and ordinary human life—is full of opportunities missed by not recognizing that change has occurred, and that the previously unthinkable is now doable.
Sometimes the most powerful revelation one can have is that circumstances have changed. That the rules you are accustomed to no longer apply. That the successful tactics may be tactics that would have been rejected under the old rules. That can be liberating. It can spur you to question your assumptions and help you rise above your fixed paradigms and restructure your thinking.
