While walking past a corner cafe, I encountered a flustered and frustrated woman.
“Excuse me,” she blocked my path, so I stopped and gave her my full attention, “do you know where I can get a coffee or something warm to drink?”
I pointedly glanced at the cafe’s neon “Open” sign not three feet from where we stood before returning my focus to her next words.
“I thought I knew…but dammit, there’s just nothing around! I hate this city…Do you have any idea?”
I turned my head once more toward the sign before replying, “I’m afraid I don’t. Good luck” and continued on my way.
I have learned the hard lesson, many times over, that you do not argue with other people’s realities. They have to be willing to give up their illusions before they can see what is right in front of them.
We each impose our own views on the world around us, and that view is filtered through our own experience, emotions and interpretation of events.
These experiences are sometimes so vastly different, that they only barely share common ground.
This is why we have Science and the scientific method.
It’s not perfect, but it’s the best way we’ve found to discover the overlapping Truths in the world we all experience.
To benefit fully though, the scientific method requires that each individual be willing to question deeply held beliefs and assumptions, even those that are sacred and most basic, and give them up, if the evidence points that way.
We have to be willing to be wrong. Sometimes embarrassingly so. And being wrong is hard. It’s even harder to admit it. Pride and Fear get in the way.
And yet, the benefits are great. Freedom, clarity, and access to the most beautiful, wondrous experiences of living life free from the shackles of the very same Fear and Pride that would keep us all small.
Because the more we confront those emotions, collectively and individually, the easier they are to thwart.
It’s simple to do: look for ways you might be wrong. Find the arguments that your opponents champion that have merit without emotion, and perhaps most importantly, notice the presence of fear, anger or pride in your own position.
Where those emotions reside, so do lies, deceits, and obfuscation.
(Almost*) No one ever died of embarrassment, but lies and deceptions have unmatched powers of destruction.
Live in the truth.