Step away from the exhausting digital chatter
As humans we have learned how to fly but seem to have lost the ability to dawdle.
All posts tagged: Maria Popova
Moments of resonance
As humans we have learned how to fly but seem to have lost the ability to dawdle.
Have the courage to change your mind
By the time I first met John Buchanan, he had finished his eight terms in the U.S. Congress as a Republican representing Birmingham, Alabama. This third generation Baptist minister was long past the time when he was targeted for defeat in 1980 by the Moral Majority. He was even past his term as the founding chairman of the liberal lobbying group People for the American Way. When I met John and his wife Betty in the 1990s, they were the loving and selfless grandparents to a granddaughter who was in a youth group with our twins. However, their intellect, courage, sense of public service, and generous spirit were still very much in evidence in everything they touched. Betty died in 2011, and I was thinking about our connections and their lives after I heard the news of John’s passing on March 5th at the age of 89. John had the courage to change his mind, even at the cost of his political future. First elected in the Republican wave of 1964, following the passage of …
Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind
Writer Maria Popova speaks of our need “to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, and to combine and recombine these pieces and build new ideas” if we seek to be creative and truly want to contribute to the world. To reach this level of creativity and understanding of our beliefs, it is important that we be open to change. After noting that we should allow ourselves the “uncomfortable luxury” of changing our minds, Popova writes: “We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our ‘opinions’ based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, …
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