Don't Believe Everything You Think
My brother-in-law used to have a bumper sticker on his truck. “Don’t believe everything you think.” When I first saw it, I was a bit confused. Of course I believe what I think! It’s the same brain, after all. But then, after not believing that thought for awhile, I realized that it was a reminder to examine our own thoughts. Our first impressions are often wrong, long-held values can fail to adapt to changing times, and even our most well thought-out opinions need to change in the face of new evidence. When I talk about doing internal work and dealing with our crap before bringing it to the table, it’s all about learning not to believe everything I think. How do I do that?
To get out of our own heads and thought patterns, we need to expose ourselves to other people’s ways of thinking. We need to hear stories from people whose lives are different than our own. After the protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd, a lot of people complained that it wasn’t enough to just start book clubs and talk about race and the experience of being black in the United States. I agree; it’s not enough. But it’s a good place to start.
Books written by people of color give me a glimpse into a world I cannot inhabit. Books written by people living in different countries help me see their homes with new eyes. Books written by people who think differently than me offer lenses for looking at my life in a novel way. I can’t just read them to pick out how they are wrong and I’m right, or how my life is better than theirs – I have to bring true humility to the table. What would I have done differently in that situation? Would it have worked? What did they do the same as me, but turned out to have a very different result than the one I’d experienced? In the end, what did I think I knew, but didn’t turn out to be true?
When I fail to be curious, I assume people are intentionally hurtful, or careless, or failing to do the very clear correct next thing. (Of course I know what the correct next thing is). That same brother-in-law told a story from his Peace Corps days. Another Peace Corps volunteer had gone to some place in Africa, a village beside a river which had a beautiful fertile patch of land that was uncultivated. Of course, knowing better, the volunteer realized that the land would grow melons really well, giving the villagers (who were weirdly failing to do the correct thing) delicious and nutritious fruit when it grew. He worked the land and he was right, the melons were growing nicely. Nearly ready to be picked, too, when a herd of hippos rampaged across that specific field, crushing all the melons and undoing all of that hard work. The volunteer had failed to ask why the land wasn’t cultivated, assuming, incorrectly, that the villagers were too stupid, careless or lazy to cultivate the land.
We need to stop believing everything we think, or else we’re going to spend all our energy planting melons on the hippos’ annual rampaging grounds.
What new perspectives have changed your way of thinking?
