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Blog 532 – 01.22.2017

“I’ve Looked At Life From Both Sides Now …

… From win and lose and still somehow it’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all.”
Great lyrics from a great song but true for many of us who have lived life long enough to have seen it from both sides. Many of the strongly held views I had as a young man I see from the other side now. I have remarked more than once that a favorite line of mine of a younger much more Progressive Dennis Miller was what he would say after a particularly heated rant, “But that is just my opinion and I could be wrong.” Dennis doesn’t say that any more. He like most of us has become too sure of his opinions. And becoming so sure I think we forfeit not only our humility, and tolerance but our ability to learn anything new. How stark and depressing life becomes when that happens.

When was the last time you heard anyone including yourself say, “I don’t know.”? Much of what we think we know we barely know. It is almost impossible to know much of anything for sure. In philosophy class I heard a great joke. The professor said, “There are no absolutes. Therefore that statement is false.” It is possible that there are some absolutes but if there are they are far fewer that we have been given to believe. We take beliefs and theories on a certain amount of faith because they seem sound but are not strictly speaking proven facts. Much of life is like that, having to make a decision or take a position without all the facts. Therefore we ought to remain a little less rigid in our opinions to allow for new or compelling information.

That reminds me of another joke. A very self confident young man said, “I thought I was wrong once but I was mistaken.” How hard it is for most of us to admit when we are wrong and change our minds. But that is because we don’t do it enough. Almost exclusively right brain thinking men laugh at women and say, “It is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.” When it is everyone’s prerogative to do so and that is not a sign of weakness or vacillation but of education. If one has not changed one’s mind in forty years then one’s education concluded forty years ago. I will go out on a limb here and submit there have probably been at least a few new developments since ninteen seventy seven. I mean besides platform shoes, bell bottom pants, fuzzy bow ties, and disco. Fun seventies styles and music  make a resurgence from time to time, but eight tracks have been superceded and a lot of seventies thinking.

I am not telling anyone what or how to think just encouraging everyone to do a little more of it for themselves. Group think seems to always end badly for us. New think has the potential to improve things and us as individuals. I have a theory I call “use it or lose it”, that I think it applies to the body and the mind. We exercise the body by moving it around. We exercise the mind in the same way by moving it around and looking at things from different angles. We will never be able to see things differently unless we try to see them from the other guys point of view. It is intellectually dishonest to base our opinions, theories, and beliefs from a single limited point of view.

“I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White