Reconsidered

Dogma dominates the public discourse.  Pundit, politician, persuader, you’re supposed to stake out your position and cling to it like Baby Huey with his lollipop; if you modify your view, even the tiniest bit, you’re castigated as a “flip-flopper” and considered a traitor to your party, your people, and everything that’s holy (or unholy depending on your God.)

But you know what?  There’s really nothing better than having your mind changed.  (Although I could be wrong about that.)  

It’s actually a relief, and a gift, to see things in a new light.  Exhibiting what one of my grad school professors, Bill Talbott, always called “epistemological humility” is liberating.  It allows you to grow and develop as a thinker and a human being (noting that those two are often at odds.)

So, when you arrive at the traditional Thursday night meeting place with a plan in mind, you can either bang your spoon on the high chair until people come to their senses and see things your way, or can come to your own senses and allow the winds of more popular (or, at least, more forcefully expressed) opinion to take you where it may.

And when you do so, (and when you continue doing so, even after an initial destination is discarded halfway through), you’re rewarded with just what you wanted all along—even if you didn’t know it at the time.

The beach was perfect for a fire that could be stood around rather than just in front of, and saving the covered location for another night when—unlike this overcast by dry fall evening—covering would be called, for made perfect sense even to those whose minds were almost made up.

Positions were modified, directions were changed, before you knew it, an offshore breeze was stoking the flames enough to turn strangers to converts.

Eventually, every chair was burned and the assembled re-assembled elsewhere, not what anyone planned for, but a plan perfectly executed nonetheless.