Changing Your Mind is the Hardest Thing you’ll ever do!
June 16, 2021
Changing your mind is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Think about it…We seek to build structures to keep us safe in an uncertain and ever-changing world. We build physical structures; buildings, roadways, transportation systems, wastewater infrastructure, power grids, and so on. We take these things for granted (if you are one of the fortunate ones born in an affluent country), but what are they really for? They are expressions of our desire for innovation, for efficiency, for access, convenience, and comfort but most importantly our human structures are an attempt to fortify ourselves, protect ourselves from the unpredictability of the wild universe.
An impossible task, yet we persist. We seem hardwired to do it. Safety is understood to be one of our basic survival needs. With advances in technology, applied science, and engineering our motivation appears to be more esoteric but what is the first thing we do when we land on Mars? We check the weather. Why? Because it is basic to our survival. We evaluate the air, we look for evidence of water, we test the soil because our first interest is to ascertain whether this environment is hostile or friendly to human life.
We also build structures in our minds. We build systems of values and beliefs and rules to live by. These thought structures are critical to our survival. Having an underdeveloped or impaired ability to create and understand thought structures can seriously impact our survivability. Many great, sustainable, and entertaining thought structures have been invented and refined by humans. There are just as many that have brought us great sorrow and destruction. Suffice to say we can’t seem to help ourselves from attempting to impose boundaries on infinity.
In order to act, we must believe in limits, and what we believe establishes the limits for our actions. We live in a paradox. We are constantly tripping over our own thought projections. We are capable of forming expansive concepts like infinity, probability, and quantum mechanics but we cannot act within them without losing our minds simply because in order to function we need both structure and void.
This is why changing our minds is just about the hardest thing we will ever do. We are hardwired to seek, build and attach to structure. We are vulnerable to believing the most unbelievable things and then acting on these beliefs despite concrete, available and abundant evidence that either dispute these structures or expose them as toxic to life. Some examples might include: flat earthers, smoking, genocide, handguns, clearcutting, hunting to extinction, torture, sex trafficking, and dumping our garbage everywhere including space. Attempting to live in a non-binary world is confusing to most of us. We need to believe in gravity even though it can be defied. In space, up and down are arbitrary and perhaps ‘old school’ as concepts go.
However difficult, some of us do, on occasion manage to change our minds. Some of us even achieve a degree of mastery over our basic instincts from time to time. What is our motivation? Why would we be willing to endure the discomfort and persist in the effort that is required to shift the behemoth that is our mindset? Because suddenly we can see connections!
Our relentless drive to explore, innovate and improve our technology has given us a new perspective on ourselves. We have connected ourselves digitally, one to another all across the globe. We are accountable to each other now because we have seen the earth from space.
