Why do we love flowers in our gardens, but hate dandelions in our lawns?
A dandelion is just a pretty little yellow flower that grew where it chose instead of where we planted it….why do we paint them with a different brush?
It’s the same, but different.
Have you ever noticed how intolerant we can become when we encounter something different than what we expect? For some reason, we generally don’t like different. Or at least we don’t like some kinds of different.
I remember, years ago. A person I considered a dear friend wounded me so deeply. She sent me a letter and told me that she felt that we could no longer be friends because we had different opinions on topics (I honestly don’t remember what the topic was, but it wasn’t earth shattering). We had grown to be too different, she said, and our friendship was no longer working. Or something to that effect.
I was so terribly hurt, not because we were different people with different views on the world, but because she felt that because of those differences in thinking that we couldn’t be friends. We had more commonalities than differences, but to her the differences were more important than the commonalities.
The same, but too different.
The people in this world that I tend to value the most are not those who share the exact same views of the world that I do. Rather the people I value the most in my life are the ones who are willing to debate different viewpoints. To challenge me in my thinking with valid arguments and who are willing to continue to be friends even when a particular topic cannot be resolved between us. To have a different view of the world doesn’t make us incompatible, it makes us both think harder, challenge our own ideals, and hopefully come out the other side a little bit better equipped for the next conversation.
I get that some people think a different opinion is the same thing as being disagreeable, as saying :you’re wrong”.
But that’s not true.
If we all thought the exact same way, what a terribly boring and stuck-in-the-mire world this would be. We would never progress if all we did was sit around and congratulate ourselves and each other for our agreeable natures and our aligned thinking.
What an absolutely terrible world it would be.
If I disagree with what you think, or tell you that I think differently, I’m not trying to imply you’re an idiot (even if perhaps I think you are), or even that you are wrong (though that may be the case), rather I am trying to understand why you think the way you think and I am trying to see if you are willing to challenge your own way of thinking while you challenge mine….based on evidence and facts.
But if you or I aren’t willing to consider that maybe, just perhaps, the thinking each of us may have on a topic is not perfectly aligned with the weight of available evidence, on whatever topic it may be, then neither one of us is really thinking at all, instead we are just reacting to something that is different from what we want to believe.
We all have to be open to the chance that we could be wrong. And we all have to be willing to accept that wrong isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. It’s a terrible thing to be wrong and not be able to accept that we may be wrong and be completely unwilling to change our position based on a weight of evidence.
Like this dandelion….yes, it’s a weed in a lawn. Yes, a coworker just yesterday was telling me that he finds it therapeutic to wage war on any dandelion the second it shows its yellow face and that he wanders the street with his bucket and feels so self satisfied when he pulls one out of his lawn, or a neighbours, and puts it in his bucket.
Maybe that’s just his way of coping with the current world situation and our place in it.
Is a dandelion really wrong just for having the temerity to put its root down in your lawn?
It’s still a pretty yellow flower, for a while anyway.
(107/365)
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