Can “I
Don’t Know” Be Your Place of Peace?
I mention
in a newsletter a free offer of an onsite consult and add “Please, God, not
Medford.” One of the readers is incensed enough at what
she assumes is an arrogant, superior Ashland attitude to tell me so. Real reason: I passionately loathe red-light
ticket-cameras; evidence suggests that they are a revenue-generation scam,
unrelated to road safety. So I avoid
Medford except for select shopping districts which I can get to without passing
the revenue-scams. She jumped to a completely
erroneous conclusion, because she assumed that she knew. She was absolutely certain, in a situation
where she had NO actual information. All
she had was a trying-to-be-funny remark and an Ashland mailing address.
Our brains
are primed to do this by millions of years during which our ancestors were
lunch to every passing carnivore. The
“assume it’s an enemy” neural pathways that run through memory and limbic
system are the culprits in the “jumping to a conclusion” problem. But being sure in a situation where certainty
is not immediately warranted forms a major barrier in our road to inner
peace. Think I’m exaggerating? OK. Eliminate
all national politics from the calculation and think about the last 5 times
that you got yourself into a tizzy about something. Ask yourself WHY you were so certain that you
knew the other person’s motivation and ethics.
Do this on paper, not in your head.
So you have three columns: What I
Was Sure Of; WHY I Was 100% Sure; What I Discovered When I Asked or Researched.
For most of
our tizzies, that last column is blank.
We never check our assumptions.
Now, please
hear me clearly: many times we are sure because our inner wisdom has perceived
one of the English-language’s covert verbal attack patterns. Even when we can’t verbalize how we know, we
accurately know that the person is an Enemy.
But it’s not our inner wisdom in every single case. Sometimes it is our brain taking a short-cut
from input to conclusion, bypassing evidence completely. In psychology, we call this Filling in the
Gaps. Our brains “save time” by filling
in the information gaps in what we see, hear or read, by filling in the gaps
with beliefs, prejudices and memories of people superficially similar to this
person. This allows us to feel (limbic
system, remember?) that we have the preparation for an adequate conclusion.
In the case
I started with, all my client knew about me was that I teach great classes, I
write books and I live in the Ashland zipcode.
What info does a person have in all that to come to conclusions about
why I avoid Medford?
The major
motivation for striving to limit the short-circuits to certainty is the damage
that our anger causes in our relationships, with strangers as well as loved
ones, and the legitimate shame that we feel when we discover the real reason
behind people’s actions. Naturally, the
road to forgiveness, of ourselves as well as others, beckons, but how much
better to never go down that road at all!
It IS
possible to take control of this Filling in the Gaps. Start with awareness of the problem. Practice stopping in your mental tracks every
time you feel a conclusion forming, about anything. Ask yourself, “WHY am I certain?” If you can interrupt one in a hundred of your
leaps to conclusion, it is a start. As
you start this process, you will get to the point where less and less of your
precious peace of mind is poisoned with conclusions that you were certain about
– for which a better conclusion would have been “I don’t know.” Not knowing is an amazing place of
power. Some Not Knowing isn’t worth more
effort, like why the bank teller was short with you. [Best bet: a personal problem.] Say a prayer, send Reiki and move on.
As Mark
Twain reminds us, “It’s not the things you don’t know that will get you into
trouble. It’s the things you know for
sure that just ain’t so.” Amen.
