Here we are in the 21st Century. Technology is moving faster than we can keep up with, opening whole new arenas to us. The options of what we watch, listen to, read and connect with are so much more expansive than at any other part of our lives, informing us of any little thing we could hope to know.
With this information tingling at our fingertips, we gain insight and clarification, broadening our understanding of our world, our co-inhabitants, and our role here. There is hardly a corner of our planet that cannot be explored or probed. History and science amaze us at each turn; societies unveil themselves regularly to our viewing and to our views. Opinions, paradigms, presupposition cannot help but change and morph with the information played upon our senses.
And we do, we all do, we have our opinions of how life should be, how it should look and how it should fit into the puzzle. The problem is that there never is just a one piece puzzle. So we have got to figure out how our piece fits in with the growing number of pieces. The more we learn, the bigger the puzzle gets. Or as my mother used to say to me, “The more we know, the more we know we don’t know.”
Information and education are absolutely wonderful stuff. It fills our minds and our beings, shaping our thoughts and showing us our world. To stop this process is to stop our progress.
I do not need to agree with everything I find out on this great information ride, but I have learned in life all people, all creatures, are viable. Each of us has a story; each of us has a place. We have weight and validity. We leave our mark. There is no such thing as a broad brush that can color all things one color. The human existence is far more complicated and faceted than that. To grab this brush and begin painting in just one hue is trivializing our own experience at best, and I won’t be trivialized.
There are many who would not choose my way of life and quite a few who don’t understand it. That’s fine. There is an awful lot out there I don’t understand.
Some may want to clip me, belittle my choice, out and out degrade me. I’m not going to pick up the fight, engage in the argument, nor bend to intimidation.
I will lift my voice in support and in portrayal of a way of life I live each and every day (after all it is me that is living it). I will continue to learn about our shared existence here on this planet and, in doing so, link my voice with the marvels of it.
Congruent to all of this, I’ll hold this thought: a mind that harbors prejudice blocks itself from truth. Without the truth, there is darkness. And darkness fosters ignorance.
~ Submitted by A Woman’s Place ~
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