Cleaning House

Santa Cruz do Sul, 21. 12. 2023

December 2023: I'm in the process of cleaning house, or to be more precise, I'm cleaning my mail box in which thousands of emails have accumulated over the years. Many I'm just glancing through, others I'm reading from beginning to end. The most astonishing: I seem to have not changed at all – my opinions have remained essentially the same over the years. Insights that I thought to be recent proved to have been gained many years ago.

A primary school reunion comes to mind: most of us hadn't seen each other for thirty years and nothing had changed. The loud mouth was still the loud mouth, the shy was still shy. The careers, the achievements, the social standing – nothing seemed to matter. It strangely felt as if time had been standing still.

Similarly was my feeling when going through my old emails. There was however a difference: the primary school reunion I experienced as strangely unreal and could be thus easily dismissed yet having in front of my eyes the evidence that my world view, my values and insights had been amazingly stable for many years let me suspect that I had only become ripe and not mature.

So did all my learning not contribute to a better understanding of the world? It surely doesn't look like it. Moreover,  it seems to me that it is the other way 'round: our conventional wisdom is a distraction for it hinders us to see the world as it is. I've got no problem with this – as long as I take our way of thinking not too seriously.