Clarity and Compassion
May 15, 2014
Keeping a firm grip on the difference between what you know and what you choose to believe will lower your stress, improve your relationships, improve your communication, and improve your clarity of mind. What's not to like?
Keeping what I know (by definition, what can be tested and proven) separate from what I choose to believe (by definition, the things that I choose to hold true based on internal and external factors that I do not necessarily have in common with others) not only means that I can quit arguing with people that have different beliefs, it means that I don't have to be scared of them, and I don't have to dislike, let alone hate, them. In fact, it makes other people with other backgrounds and other beliefs kind of interesting, and can lead to all sorts of entertaining and edifying conversations.
In fact, it opens the door to the possibility that if I am a good listener and genuinely interested in other people's stories (and not just telling my own, or propping up my insecurities by only hanging out with people that reinforce my prejudices, er, beliefs), then I might actually care about why somebody believes what they believe. And that's the beginning of compassion.
Understanding that my beliefs are my beliefs is delightfully liberating. It frees me to change my mind when I come across new information. It frees me from the insecurity of knowing at some level that I don't have it all worked out—of course I don't have it all worked out). It frees me to enjoy the journey, instead of always trying to figure out if we're there yet. It frees me from policing other people's beliefs, and it frees me from needing to be right all the time (which takes an awful lot of energy...). It frees me to see people for who they are, rather than who I think they should be. And it frees me to appreciate similarities as well as differences and to look for ways to build bridges instead of walls.
Certainty is an emotion. We feel that we have the truth on our side, that we know what we're talking about, that we will ultimately be vindicated somehow. And most of us have had the actual experience at least once of feeling to our very toes that we were dead right about something, only to find out that unfortunately we were dead wrong—usually with a humiliation that is directly proportional to the volume and adamancy with which we proclaimed our rightness right up until the time we were shown to have misremembered or misjudged a situation.
More quietly and with less embarrassment, most of us can remember a time when we simply changed our minds. We used to believe one thing, and now we believe something else. If it happened once, it can happen again, and we should give others the same freedom to learn and grow throughout their lives that we're going to need to get through ours.
If we can give up the stubborn quest for an elusive certainty that is only as robust as our willingness to ignore other points of view, then we can step into a clarity of thought and understanding and a peaceful coexistence with ourselves and others that is not available to those stuck in the "I'm right so you must be wrong" camp. The more certain we are of our own rightness and our own infallibility, the quicker we are to assume that others are stupid or evil (or both), the less we listen and understand, the less we love, the less we learn and grow.
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