Thursday, October 29, 2015
Over the years I have gradually come to a deeper and deeper appreciation of how little our mind's can actually know. We can take classes, obtain academic degrees, spend years of our lives in the pursuit of researching very specialized subjects and yet still fail to accurately anticipate what people we know will do tomorrow.
Early life conditioning seems to have a significant bearing on the patterns of thought that may fill our own minds. If we are subjected to chaos, violence or excessive stress over long periods of time we may eventually come to expect such circumstances to always be our reality. In a similar way an early history of being deeply hurt by other people might seemingly predispose us to expect to be hurt by people in the future. Expecting people to disappoint or hurt us on a regular basis is a horrible way to live. Unfortunately it's a type of thinking that plagued me for years. I attribute my own early life history as being a significant factor in the patterns of thought that became common in my mind later on.
And yet the mind's predictive power is finite! I was reminded of this last night when my greatest fears running through my mind were not realized. Nothing horrible happened to me. Indeed, the end of my day instead had an anti-climactic air about it. It was a bit surreal how easily I could get carried away with the ruminations and deepest fears contained within my own mind.
Some habits take a while to break.
Over the years I have gradually come to a deeper and deeper appreciation of how little our mind's can actually know. We can take classes, obtain academic degrees, spend years of our lives in the pursuit of researching very specialized subjects and yet still fail to accurately anticipate what people we know will do tomorrow.
Early life conditioning seems to have a significant bearing on the patterns of thought that may fill our own minds. If we are subjected to chaos, violence or excessive stress over long periods of time we may eventually come to expect such circumstances to always be our reality. In a similar way an early history of being deeply hurt by other people might seemingly predispose us to expect to be hurt by people in the future. Expecting people to disappoint or hurt us on a regular basis is a horrible way to live. Unfortunately it's a type of thinking that plagued me for years. I attribute my own early life history as being a significant factor in the patterns of thought that became common in my mind later on.
And yet the mind's predictive power is finite! I was reminded of this last night when my greatest fears running through my mind were not realized. Nothing horrible happened to me. Indeed, the end of my day instead had an anti-climactic air about it. It was a bit surreal how easily I could get carried away with the ruminations and deepest fears contained within my own mind.
Some habits take a while to break.
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