Today's Challenge:
Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imagine your future self, ie, you 10 years from now. If he/she were to send you a tweet or text message, 1) what would it say and 2) how would that transform your life or change something you're doing, thinking, believing or saying today?
Today's entry:
I'm sorry, but I just can't bring myself to finish off #Trust30 by writing a fictional Tweet from the future. It just feels wrong, and we already covered our 5-year-future self on Day 8. No offense to the author of the prompt – I realize these were in no particular order, and I probably would've eaten it up on Day 3.
Emerson's quote caught my eye, though. I'm a stubborn person (people I've known might use other words), and I spent a lot of my youth refusing to change, because that was somehow a betrayal to my "true" being.
Unfortunately, I couldn't see that there was a huge difference between my habits and my core ideals. As a scientist, I eventually started having to admit that sometimes the evidence for my way being the best way was pretty thin. Sometimes, the evidence quite clearly pointed to the opposite of my way being the right way. So, I learned to listen. Or, at least, I'm learning to listen.
It wasn't always my way or the highway. Sometimes, it was my way that needed to hit the road.
It's Emerson's "hard words" that I struggle with. How can we speak with conviction, knowing that we may discover we're wrong 10 years (or 10 days) down the road? We see the extreme in politics every day – people who shout with absolute certainty about their views, only to shout with absolute certainty about the opposite view a week later, because the first view was inconvenient to their political party. If you think this is a partisan issue and that only the other team does it, then you've already missed the point.
How do we speak with passion and conviction, all the while knowing that our perceptions are tragically flawed? I wish I had an easy answer. I completely understand how people fall into the trap of comfortable dogma. Believing a lie is much easier than doubting the truth every single day.
I think the answer is that this is simply the human condition – all we have is imperfect knowledge and subjective perceptions. We can do our best, speak the truth as we know it, and try to stay open to new possibilities, we can accept dogma and never stray from it, or we can curl up in a hole and never open our mouths. Given the options, there's only one choice I can live with.
