Monday mindfulness Minute: "Has It ever Occurred to You That You Might Be Wrong?"

Five years ago, I would have been insulted if you had asked me this question or even insinuated that I could be wrong about anything. The double whammy of growing up as an only child and being Valedictorian in high school firmly lodged the belief that I was always right deep into my psyche. As it turns out, the "skill" of memorizing and regurgitating information is far from the insanity of trying to predict the future, which is what the mind seems most preoccupied with these days.

The more I watch, the more I see that my mind is consistently and predictably wrong about the weather, what others will do, why they do what they do, whether the plan is going to work out, how long traffic is going to take, how people are going to react, whether there will be rotissere chickens left at the grocery story, whether it's going to rain 4 and a half weeks from now when I'm on vacation, why that person did what they did 3 years ago, where I would be now if I had done something different 2 years ago, how a friendship will turn out, whether the sore throat will turn out to be the first signs of a debilitating disease, and on and on and on and on.

To be fair to the mind, it's doing the best with what it has, which is a limited set of data comprised of our past experiences. It then takes this data, which is statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of everything that is happening everywhere, and comes up with an "educated" guess about what's going to happen next. The issue is not that the mind thinks, as this abstract thinking serves as the foundation for some of our greatest human discoveries, but that we take these guesses and turn them into convictions about ourselves, our lives, and (most dangerously) others. We become convicts trapped inside the limited confines of our minds when we automatically believe the first thing that comes to mind.

It turns out that “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” is not an insult but a lifeline. Asking ourselves this question, repeatedly and especially when we are convinced we are right, might be the leverage we need to crack the prison of our mind open to find our freedom beyond the endless thoughts of assumption that leave us closed to learning anything new.

I think the boy in "The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and The Horse" is onto something when he asks, "Is there a school of unlearning?" The classroom of unlearning is in session each day. If we dare to show up, we will learn to pause for a second to consider that we don't know and to embrace curiosity over certainty, asking over telling, and love over judgement.