Don’t be rigid.
It seems that some people pick a point in their lives where they say, “I’ve learned enough. I’m never gonna learn another thing.”
Why does this happen? I can only guess, but I think it probably has to do with feeling like you are under attack. If you live in a situation where your opinion does not matter or is openly attacked and ridiculed, you tend to draw a line in the sand. It’s like if you were a country and one piece of land became contested. You fight and fight for it, and finally win it, but it turns out you didn’t really need it after all. Things changed that took away the need for that land, but you still have it. You can’t just get rid of it. You fought too hard to get it, then defend it. So you’re stuck with it.
I think another reason people become rigid is because it is truly a difficult process to learn new things. Very often, the new things we learn contradict the old so that we have to rethink what we thought we already knew. Someone once said: “The more I learn, the less I know.”
If you fall into the trap of becoming rigid, you have closed your mind. It’s as if you are saying you know all you want to know. This is dangerous because it takes away one of our greatest abilities—the ability to adapt. Life itself is ever changing. You’re changing, your friends are changing, work, kids, etc, ad infinitum. You have to be able to adapt, and to do this you have to have an open mind. You have to be mentally flexible enough to be able to discard what no longer works. The irony here is that often you will come back to an idea you previously discarded, but you will come back to it in a whole new light—enlightened, if you will. I like to think of this notion like a spiral upwards. We know something as a kid. Later, we learn things that make us reject it as a teenager. We learn even more things that make us re-adopt the same idea when we are in middle age or even old age. But I promise you this, the idea, whatever it may be, is a better, more fully realized idea for having been discarded and rediscovered.
No single idea is so precious that it can’t be subject to examination and rethinking. If the idea holds truth, you will inevitably come back to it, but with more realization than you had in the past.
