I have a friend, Bonnie, who uses a quotation at the bottom of her emails: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.”
Let’s try this exercise. What do you call the traffic device at the street corner with lights of red, green, and yellow? Most people would call it a “stop light.”
Now, knowing when the red is on the side facing you, the sides to the left and right will be yellow or green. In principle, when we are stopped other people are moving, so, why don’t we call these traffic signals “go lights” instead?
One theory is there may be an internal conflict between being an optimist or a pessimist: “The Sun will Come Up Tomorrow” vs. “Rainy Days and Mondays,” Tuesday’s child vs. Wednesday’s child, and (with profound respect to another friend) Polly Anna vs. Chicken Little.
Do we primarily see GREEN/GO or RED/STOP because of our life’s experiences, or is it how, where, or when we were born? Is it learned or inherited? One could present arguments for either position.
I recently saw a news article about a school janitor who was a NASA engineer, had a stroke and could not remember most of his life, but tutored kids on math after hours. I also met an Uber driver who spent over thirty years in banking but left because of site closures and layoffs. Both reported they were happy to count their blessings: they still had jobs, roofs over their heads, but most important, people who loved them.
RED or GREEN, neither answer is wrong (nor right, see how easily that happened). “If you change the way you look at things…,” well, you get the point. Blaise Pascal, a person of many disciplines in the 1600’s said: “You do not show greatness by being at one extreme, but rather by touching both extremes at once.”
When I was a young airman, two of my first international assignments were Guam and then Italy. Understand that I grew up in the 60’s and early 70’s in the Four Corners region of the American southwest surrounded by music of Merle Haggard and others. It was a time of “my country, right or wrong” and “if you don’t love it, leave it.” However, when I was deployed overseas, I came face-to-face with people who didn’t think like me, and in Italy, didn’t even speak my language.
Let’s be clear on one thing: The adage “If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything” still affects my decision-making, but I’ve also recognized over my 68 years that absolute thinking easily led me into labeling others in extreme terms of good or bad, difficult or supportive, red or blue, left or right. Once these labels got reinforced a couple of times, my basic pessimism gelled into new biases, and I began to see ALL people unlike me in these terms. Eventually I began to say things like “ALL XXXX’s are YYYYY,” (you can fill in the X’s and Y’s).
With maturity and later exposure to more cultures, even those within our own USA, I began to understand that “not American” was different from “un-American,” that my ceiling could also be someone else’s floor.
Pascal’s quotation challenged me to develop an open mind about issues, people, and events, and now I try to understand the data before I rush to a conclusion based solely on my biases (which I still have BTW). Pascal is not saying to ignore the principles that drive us, but to recognize that different does not necessarily mean wrong (although Pascal could not know about communism in Russia and China, and global terrorism).
I’d also be wrong to imply people should change their innermost beliefs concerning today’s issues, but I do ask the next time you find yourself slipping into seeing people in only RED light or GREEN terms, take a minute to look at the foundations of your judgment. Yes, you may still be “right” about them, but then again….
Best regards to all, and let’s be safe out there.
