Food for Thought…
Linda Nicholas
Due to yet another challenging personal encounter this morning I got thinking about the reason people will go to such frustrating lengths to avoid admitting that they do not know something. I have heard it said they are the three hardest words to say. Only once has a medical Doctor ever said to me “I don’t know”… it was such a relief! Young people especially have learned, (from being embarrassed and ashamed when they make mistakes?), the fear of admitting they simply do not know.
This all led my thinking to perhaps it is about humbleness. The humbleness that tells you that you do not and never will have all the facts, life is laid out that way, and allowing that to be okay provides you with the faith that you can always learn.
Humbleness is never to be confused or compared with shame, humiliation, and servitude. Words and their meaning which have been skewered and mutilated, where they once were honourable and uplifting, have instead become enslaving and oppressive.
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Important words. Words of power like faith, to give us hope, to wrap each and every human being within a deep Knowing that there is something greater than their worst fears and experiences, both within ourselves and within our world. Faith that we are loved, loveable and loving. Faith that allows us to leap with ours eyes wide open into the unknown. Never to be confused with or compared to blindly following, cultivated ignorance or the forfeiting of our will and our choice.
We are here for choice. We have the inherent right to choose for ourselves. Our choice is our own. Each and every one of us own our own choices in life. It is this right that enables our integrity, the focus of our individual being here. Our choice can only be as accurate as our access to experience and information, whether they be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Be that as it may, either way, the more information and experience we have the better choices we can make.
How then can we human beings, wrapped firmly in our right to be right and right to be wrong reach out to one another? How can we not reach out to one another? How can our experience be full and complete without one another? We are each of us a wealth of unlimited information waiting to be experienced. Some of it accurate, some of it not. Some for good, some for ill.
When we think we already know or believe we have all the answers, we have made a choice and we are no longer open to options, which closes us down to the possibility to more and perhaps better choices in life, or the address the fact that we could have perhaps made the wrong choice. Language is a tool of expression. Let us use it to explore how much of our own experience is comprehensible to one another.
Let us choose the definition what will enrich our experience; enrichment over deprivation, faith over fear, illumination over blindness, service over servitude, empowerment over shame. Humbleness over humiliation. The humbleness that arises from leaping into the unknown with our eyes wide open guided only by the faith that we are loved, and we will be just fine, and that there is so much more learn.
