What if we gave up needing to be the experts, and embraced being novices?
What if we loved knowledge for its own sake, and shared it freely with everyone?
What if we saw ourselves as both teachers and students?
Cultivating what my dad calls "a learning mind" seems to me to be one of the finest ways to promote peaceful interaction between people. So many individuals cling to the need to be the acknowledged expert in their niche; even falsifying data or results to get the accolades they crave. (Internet forums are unfortunately full of this behavior…) I love the idea of giving that up, and instead embracing the paradigm of "there's always more to learn." Instead of "I'm always right" we would get to say "Well I don't know, maybe there's more than one way to go about this."
I think we would learn more because we wouldn't be closing ourselves off to new sources of information. I think we would have more peace because we wouldn't feel threatened when someone had more information than we did. I think we would become more flexible, more open to positive change, and more international.
What do you think?
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