🧘 TREE 676: Flex!

I don’t resist what is. I realize it and embrace the challenge. It’s inevitable my beliefs will change. The choices will always be for MORE 🪷

— Denelle DeFer

Holding your beliefs lightly and changing them when evidence reveals the need keeps your understanding of the world closer to reality. That’s obvious. It’s also a defence against cynicism. When you decide it is inevitable that your beliefs will change, you enter a world where there’s always something new to learn, where answers lead to more interesting questions, where growth is normal, where the universe is always expanding. Change reveals your flexibility.

When you cling to beliefs and refuse to change, your world can only get smaller. Everything that doesn’t fit your beliefs must be rejected, so the longer you live, the more of life you must exclude. The world becomes a fearful and dangerous place. You lose flexibility. Change is an existential threat: you may be irreparably broken.

Wabi-sabi symmetry

Typing today’s words throws up an old warning in the back of my mind.

When I was a kid people liked to warn against being so open-minded that your brain leaks out. On the surface, it’s good advice about having healthy scepticism, verifying what you are told, finding good evidence. But it seemed to me that it was more often used as a warning to stay in the tribe, to avoid unapproved ideas, to keep away from ‘dangerous’ thoughts. Because the Tribe holds the truth and the Others Outside believe the wrong things.

Resisting change, resisting new ideas is about clinging to an illusion of power and control. It’s a fear response. And it may not even be your fear. It may be ingrained by people who fear losing control of your (former) tribe.

May your beliefs follow the evidence.
May your grow ever more flexible!
Jeff