A few years ago, while going through the customary “how was your day at school ,son?” with my then 9 yr old , he talked about this new technique they learnt in debate that week where the teacher gave the Kids a topic and divided the candidates into the for and against teams. They were asked to research and debate based on what they had learnt for their respective stands on the topics. The kids spent a couple of days researching and then vehemently debating on the topic in class. Soon after the teacher declared – now switch your stand, the for team is now going to speak against the topic and vice versa. I could see my son was quite bowled over by the process and he said that most of the students were rendered speechless, as this time they were given no time to prepare.
Humans put an unnecessary pressure on themselves to question deeply things about the world and then to come up with strong opinions, hence sometimes leaving little scope for change of those beliefs. This teacher was doing a service to these kids to have have hit them hard with an exercise like this. At such a young age they were being taught that the universe will always be bigger then their opinion and there will always be so much more then what they have learnt.
When we become adults, ego may enter our learning processes based on our experiences.So maybe if after forming an opinion on things we start looking at any new facet , not as a need for change of our opinion but as an evolution of our existing one, we would be doing ourselves a huge favour,without our ego feeling the need for a massage.
At home we sometimes inadvertently create an environment, which in the name of our family culture and values, could put pre-conceived notions into our young children’s mind. I won’t go into the details of that, since the facets of that may be varied for different families. Learning begins at an early age and begins at home. If we as parents can be more mindful in the manner in which we interact with our children. Lovingly provide them the means to build their own thought processes and sometimes learn from them too. We don’t need to be super smart to do that, we just need to be mindful. for eg while recommending a book to read to a child “ thats the best book a teenager could read” and adding a “ but that’s just my experience, you may have your own, pls share your thoughts too” could be a good start for both parent and child. In this case the child will be more receptive in the interaction yet learn that we may have one way of thinking, but other ways may exist too.
When we go through rigorous selection interviews and debates in schools and colleges, and sometimes jobs we are normally asked for an opinion on worldly issues. The same may be triggered when we enter new relationships or become parents. It may be imperative to a person’s growth, personal as well as professional, to keep learning, questioning and evolving, and not bind ourselves to a set thought process or not have one at all.
If a commitment to an opinion disallows us an opportunity of growth, we can possibly work towards enlightening ourselves a bit more on the topic in question. How do we realize we are stuck in our ways? Do we need to admit it to the whole world once we realiSe it? The answer to that – we just know when it happens and no it can just be our own personal journey, the world will know when we no longer need to vehemently defend an argument and it starts showing up in our actions instead. Because it’s going to feel like a simpler world then!
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P.s.-I wrote this piece a few weeks back , but since then, basis some of the interactions I have had with people from different walks of life, I learnt that the world could be so much more then even the thoughts I have shared above, and I have needed to question and learn so much in the interim. It flummoxed me, threw me off balance time and again, in the end just making it clearer, you cannot be smug about knowledge , because then it whimpers away into the background as just an opinion.
ExpressionsBySu 