It seems like there’s always a danger of life sliding into predictability.
No matter how much we know that things change over time, and you know, we’re not in the same position we were last year, certainly the world isn’t, and we kind of know that things are always changing, but it just seems like, automatically almost, as we get older, we start to kind of assume that we essentially expect the way the world works.
Now, when you put it like that, we can think well, no, of course I don’t really know how the world works, and I’m open to being surprised, because clearly I don’t know everything, and clearly things change, so I should always be open to learn new things about the way the world works.
And yet it still seems like automatically, as part of getting older, we just get more solidified and hardened in a certain perspective on the world, and it starts to become the habit of thinking that “OK, this is the world that I’m living in.
This is the way things are.” And at some level, we kind of just assume that it will continue to be this way.
And maybe this is because the alternative might be just too chaotic.
Imagine waking up every day and not knowing what world you’re in, and you have to kind of remind yourself, maybe over the course of the morning, “OK, I can see, OK, gravity’s still working, and OK, here’s my technology, and OK, I’m getting hungry, so I still need to eat, and OK, oh yeah, there’s the job that I have, it’s still there,” and all that.
Sort of having to like reload all the things that we take for granted every day.
If we didn’t assume those things, it might be a long learning process every morning just to kind of remember all the basics.
So instead, it seems, when we wake up, we simply assume that “Oh, OK, I’m waking up for another day in this world that I’m familiar with.” So from that practical level, it certainly makes sense.
But it seems like there’s a danger in going too far towards really simply assuming that the world is going to be anything in particular.
And certainly, with the recent events around the world, has shown that assumptions can be misleading.
But almost all the time, our basic assumptions about the way the world works, they are not going to be directly challenged.
Life goes on the way we expect, for the most part.
But it seems like if we go too far into simply assuming that things are a certain way, the world kind of loses some of its freshness, and our perspective loses some of its sharpness, because we just sort of just expect everything to continue.
It’s like, “Well, I already know what’s going on.
I already know how things work.
I know what to expect.
It’s almost like we make ourselves blind, because we already know what we’re about to see, so we just sort of assume it’s there.
Like when you’re walking through your home, like you don’t always necessarily think about everything you’re seeing in your home, because you expect “Oh, there’s a doorway.
I’m gonna walk through that doorway.” Because you just know it’s there.
You don’t even have to really even observe anything.
So it seems like there’s a power in being able to not assume that I know everything.
I mean, when you think about it and say the words directly, it seems obvious and clear and something that everybody should agree to, that of course I don’t know everything.
Of course I always should be open to surprises, and there can always be new things that surprise me.
And yet it seems like in the way that we live, often we don’t really feel like we’re ready to learn anything automatically.
It’s just like this this baseline of assumptions of how the world works.
It’s just so built in to how we live every day.
So maybe one way to maybe train around this is just learn one new thing every day.
Every day, find some kind of surprising thing that we had no idea about before, about anything about the world or life, personal lives, or something about the world overall.
Just find something completely new.
And maybe on the other side, we can unlearn something every day.
This is a bit harder to pin down, because it’s hard to actually say what you unlearned, but maybe something that you thought you knew and it turns out that it isn’t really valid knowledge, it isn’t really true.
And so the combination of every day learning something new and unlearning something old, it seems like we can be sure that every day we really are open to being in a new world and seeing the world with new eyes.
#newday #newperspective #learneveryday