Today's
Meditation:
We
do tend to put an awful lot of value on consistency in
people. We tend to like it when we can
"depend" upon someone always to have the same
opinion, always to say and do the same things in similar
situations, always to be in the same places at the same
times. And there is a lot of value in being
consistent, for that allows other people to put their
trust in us, our words, and our actions.
But
what Emerson is talking about here is foolish consistency,
the tendency to hold on to beliefs or thoughts or ideas
simply because we already have them. He's talking
about the person who has believed for years that smoking
doesn't harm him or her, despite mountains of evidence to
the contrary (including his or her own health
problems). He's talking about the person who
continues to support a particular politician even when it
becomes clear that the politician has violated his or her
constituents' trust regularly.
Life
is about-- or it should be about-- learning and change and
growth. We're not stagnant creatures, and we haven't
been put into stagnant situations in our lives. As
we learn, so do we change and grow, and our beliefs and
allegiances should change with us. What serves us
and our needs at age 20 isn't necessarily at all relevant
to us at 30 or 40. What we believed yesterday about
a particular person should be different today if we've
learned something new about that person.
We
like to hold onto things and ideas and beliefs because we
feel they're safe. But they're not necessarily safe;
we just feel that they are. In fact, if we hold on
to something that we've already learned is flawed or
inaccurate, then we're committing a sad action to
ourselves, allowing ourselves to be caught and held by the
chains of the past while the future beckons for us to join
it with our new and important knowledge.
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