Mayday, SOS!!
“To the tin soldier, it was like a mighty waterfall. Still, he kept his rigid posture and did not blink.”
– Hans Christian Andersen (The Steadfast Tin Soldier)
2024. Imagine you are in a spaceship circling planet earth. What you will see is that our planet is in crisis. Tired, overloaded, in shreds. Escalating reckless, human consumption, poverty and tumultuous societal problems have never been so acute as now. Global warming is more visible with every year that dawns.
We live in breakpoint times. At this time of our collective history, we are up against extraordinary circumstances. Tomorrow is guaranteed to be nothing like today. This, despite the immense benefits from modem technology, from new products, communication to health.
An unnerving characteristic of current times is the continuous explosion of knowledge, at an ever-accelerating speed. This means that much existing knowledge has already become -and is becoming almost obsolete overnight. FASTER, faster, and yet faster… A byproduct of this is that we are confronted by overwhelming and frightening change. Many of us are often wary and uncomfortable with change.
The result is that mental health is being compromised more and more. Depression and anxiety, addictions and more are hitting alarming rates while most of us unfortunately display an ostrich mentality. So, how do us, you and I, position, and safeguard ourselves against the mighty onslaught of the increasing knowledge explosion and the demand for change?
Firstly, it means that we all go on an exploration journey into our primary internal resource, our thinking. It is like mining. We keep the gold and get rid of the rubble. It is simply fact that most of us have limiting thinking habits we might not even be aware of such as criticizing self and others continuously, being self-righteous, and more. These skills can- and should of course be transported to others, especially with influence and guide the young ones who come after us.
A habit I have cultivated is to spend thirty minutes per day, just before I go to bed, on learning something new, the meaning of random new words and general knowledge; anything of interest that teaches, that is new, and you haven’t learnt before.
Secondly, it means remaining abreast with new knowledge, AI for instance which will invariably affects us all. My experience as a psychologist indicates many, many of us lack an inadequate knowledge base. The result is that we remain stuck in limitations of ignorance and being ill-equipped for transformation. If I don’t know, I cannot prepare.
A habit I have cultivated is to spend thirty minutes per day, just before I go to bed, on learning something new, the meaning of random new words and general knowledge; anything of interest that teaches, that is new, and you haven’t learnt before. Hereby you cultivate a learning culture for yourself which is excellent brain food, and it cultivates new neural networks. The Big Book affirms this where we are taught that “My people perish because of a lack of knowledge.”
Ignorance in anyone is dangerous. For the better part of my life, ignorance was at the root of all the misjudgements and mistakes I have made in the past. It prevented me from discovering the beauty of solid and well-anchored thinking and many more exciting possibilities. When I reflect on my life, I sometimes feel somewhat embarrassed for remaining in the captivity of ignorance for so long. We are so often wrong and the fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not entirely absurd.
All of us sometimes fall into the trap to form opinions and theorize before we have collected adequate data. Insensibly, we then begin to twist facts to form theories, instead of theories which match facts. Someone once said that the most important knowledge is about our own ignorance. Tragically, ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge, it is those who know little and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science, was one of Darwin’s conclusions.