Quietly steadily changing

It is easy for me to be critical.  If someone likes something I don't, I try to show them the valuable of my value.  If they don't like something I do like, I try to persuade them of the benefits or beauties they have overlooked.  Once in a great while, I have the presence of mind to accept the divergence between us, maybe even treasure it.  

As I get older, I forget that I explained why the view not my own was in error.  Meanwhile, the other person's slant quietly grows more attractive to me and I come to adopt it.  I am quite capable of taking the position they supported and trying sometime to explain to them why it is a good one and would be adopted by any rational person.  Usually, my wife is the only person close enough to me to know I switched positions.  

I am not sure whether it is modern or human or male to try for stability, consistency.  I like to think that when an answer to a question is found or constructed or discovered, that is the answer.  However, the world is not always the way I like.  I am seeing on every side that there is no stasis, nothing fixed.  The first of the four basic principles the Buddha used is that "everything changes."  So, even after I am dead, I will still change.  Hannah Holmes in The Secret Life of Dust makes clear that the hood of my car will have a few particles of dust from other parts of the galaxy on it if I leave it out for a day.  So, despite my attempt to be stable and unchanging, part of me may be on the sun or Polarius someday.

Modern organizations are learning that having a good structure must include ways for that structure to change and update at times. Reinhold Neibhur is credited with the famous serenity prayer

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can change,

And wisdom to know the difference."

I now realize that wisdom will not always arrive at the same answer about what is what and what is to be done.


--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety