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Today's
quotation:
Having lived long, I have
experienced many instances of
being obliged by better
information, or fuller consideration,
to change opinions
even on important subjects, which
I once thought right,
but found to be otherwise.
Benjamin Franklin
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Today's
Meditation:
It
can be very frustrating to be around people who stubbornly
hold on to opinions that have been proved to be wrong over
time. We see this a lot in politics, in education,
in sports, and in relationships-- people just like to hold
on to the opinions that they've had for a long time, even
when those opinions are based on inaccurate or incomplete
information.
I
hope that as life goes on I don't treat people in ways
that they don't deserve to be treated, just because I'm
holding on to an inaccurate opinion out of
stubbornness. I hope that I'm able to stay
open-minded enough to realize that much of what I think
and believe is based on ideas that I've heard from other
people, who may or may not have taken the time to get a
completely accurate picture of a given situation. As
long as I don't know something with complete accuracy,
then I can't know the whole story behind something-- and
therefore any opinion that I have about it should be
changeable.
There's
a story about a man who found that a tool of his was
gone. He suspected a neighbor boy, and the next time
he saw the boy, he walked like a thief, talked like a
thief, and acted like a thief. The next day, though,
the man found the tool someplace where he had left it
himself. The next time he saw the neighbor boy, the
child walked, talked, and acted just like a boy.
Life
is about change, and it's important that we be open to
changing our minds if we're to be completely fair to other
people as much as we possibly can. When we hold on
to outdated opinions and ideas, we can cause harm to
others by pushing for changes to situations that shouldn't
be changed, or by opposing something that probably shouldn't
be opposed. And since one of our most important
goals on the planet is not to harm others, it would be
good to give ourselves habits that keep us from doing just
that.
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