Rethinking Lifestyle

I subscribe to a newsletter that had a great article for the beginning of a new year. They are going with a theme of “Radical Resilience” for 2024. Radical means from the root or you could say from the source. It could also mean dramatically different than the norm. Resilience means that you can survive hardship and troubles by bending, not breaking. It means that you will recover after the hardship, maybe to be a different person than you were before, but a whole person, able to live energetically and enthusiastically in your new circumstance. Hardships and pain give you experience that allows you to comfort others who are in the middle of their own trauma.

We each have a role, or more than one, in our community. We do not use the word “prophet” much anymore. But there is a role for prophets in our community. A prophet is someone from within the community that is brave enough to criticize, not out of superiority or hate but out of love. A prophet is someone who seeks the best for their community and critiques it to improve it. A prophet is someone who can inspire people to be their best.

With all the divisiveness in and around our communities, and by that, I mean our country and the world we can sure use some wise and thoughtful, caring people to help us get through these hard times

There is a saying attributed to many people going back to Aristotle that says, “There are two things that can unite a people; a common enemy or a common goal.” I would say that we cannot agree on a common enemy and anyway, that is a negative focus. Can we agree on a common goal to unite us as a community, as a country as a global community?

That would be the challenge I would set for each of us. Is there a common goal that can inspire us to unite? I was asked what my New Year’s resolution was. It came out spontaneously without even realizing I had said it. I said, “I would like to change my mind about something.” It is very rare that an adult person changes their mind. In science when we find new information, we change our mind about how the world works. Hopefully each time we change our mind we get closer to the truth. That is my goal; to get closer to the truth. I do not know what I will change my mind about but the person that asked me about the resolution suggested that I would need a plan, a catalyst to increase the likelihood of coming across something to change my mind about. We live in a three-dimensional world and when you look at any three-dimensional object such as a cube you cannot see all sides from one perspective, so I intend to try to look at ideas from more that one viewpoint. That will be difficult to do because we tend to like what we already agree with and dismiss what we disagree with.

I hope that I will be able to be open-minded enough to let different viewpoints help me to come to a new understanding that I did not have before.