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I would like to know if there is any thing that has caused you to seriously shift your world view, your opinion, your paradigm of how the world really works, OK?
It could be more than just one thing, but I am asking about things that fundamentally changed how you think.
You know, I really don't remember any kind of personal paradigm shift in my worldview.
While I'm sure there have been changes, I believe these changes have happened gradually over the course of my life, without any real identifiable "trigger" events.
I have absolutely no idea if I'm any kind of exception or if my situation is the same as the majority of people's psychology.
How about yourself?
Yes, for me absolutely. But when I think about it, in almost every case its been myself who ultimately changed my mind.
When I think about a data structure, or an equation, I like to see it, then turn it on its side and look at it from a different view. I like to look at it in different pictures, some might call these pictures "paradigms". An example might be a complex number. Its a singular mathematical entity, with three views: There's the a+I*b view, the polar view, and the exponential view. When you get stuck with one view, you can switch to another to see solutions. You do it voluntarily, to see new things you couldn't see before.
That's how I see the world. I use different views to look at it in different ways, but its a voluntary thing to change views. I don't think its just me either, I think if we really look at ourselves, we'll all see that it is ultimately us who shape our views of the world, for better or for worse. That's what the word "ignorance" is really about, its not about being unable to understand, its about being unwilling to change view in the face of information that calls for a new view.
Several things changed how I thought about life.
Marriage.....and having my children....learning how fiercely protective I could be, though I am a gentle person (feisty but gentle) by nature.
I didn't realize how strong that instinct is.
Having a major accident where walking was an issue and even turning my head was not possible for a period of time. Learning to fight back and not give up, and then deal with the adjustments and accepting that in order to keep these privileges, there were things I could never do again that I loved doing. Learning in the process that WALKING and movement should never betaken for granted.
Losing a parent, and was not able to say goodbye.
Losing young family members like my niece and nephew, and others. That life is very short and you need to take it by the ears and hold on.
Almost losing my son. How sometimes you just have to go with your gut feeling.
Hearing laughter from an audience.....and realizing you made them laugh...and you could bring joy to a life......and having children ask you theatre questions that were hilarious and so honestly inquisitive!!!
Living in a place where there are many nationalities and many tourists and observing others customs and manners......or lack of.
Getting run over by a truck and almost killed was one thing. That seems a bit dramatic but it is true.Quote:
Originally Posted by Daecon
There were a few other things. Reading The Selfish Gene was one of the smaller ones. My son being born was another.
When I was young, looking at all those old black and white photographs of people and realising that all of them are long since gone, and some of them were my ancestors.
Being diagnosed with 'terminal' cancer 6-7 years ago.
As with the previous post, getting the point and the undoubted truth of the Selfish Gene Theory.
Realising that there is not a 'God' up there (or down here), and finding it deeply unsettling that people will kill for their own interpretation of 'God'.
Dying then being brought back to life was rather a wake up to take In as much as I can daily for I don't know when that will happen again and be my end for certain.
Seeing others as the same as myself and not any different was another change.
Helping the soup kitchen and talking to the homeless opened my eyes quit a bit.
Saving others lives no matter what the circumstance for when you help others in a time of their need you do not worry about yourself but only them and their plight.
I don't know about "shifting" my world view. The things that come to my mind are more about finally "seeing" ideas or facts or concepts that I'd only vaguely (or perhaps erroneously) perceived before. But there's not just one.
Going backwards in time from now ...
1. The power of adrenaline
... to get you to do something that is, in fact, beyond your physical capacities normally so limited by arthritic joints and weakened muscles. Doing CPR until the ambos could arrive and take over saving my husband's life. I'd heard about and seen people talk about such doing-things-I-couldn't-possibly-do experiences, but there's nothing like the real thing to bring it home.
2. My own rather vague feelings that the commonly accepted ideas about
a) the history of marriage and relationships and about
b) black "culture" in the USA being somehow illogical or wrong
being clarified and enlightened just by reading two fairly easy to read books. Ferdinand Mount's The Subversive Family and Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Got me thinking along completely different lines.
3. I didn't like babies - at all
- until after I had my own. I'd always got on well with children, just couldn't see the attraction of babies that so many women I knew had expressed even when they were just children.
4. The power of hormones
... to change your emotional landscape. I'd never cried at movies or tug-at-the-heartstrings books - one famous evening my sister entered the living room and called mum to come and see me sniffling in front of the TV, but it wasn't a soppy movie, it was that dreadful newsreel footage of neverending lines of WWI soldiers shuffling along holding onto the shoulder of the man in front because they'd all been blinded by gas. But once I was more than 6 months pregnant with number 1, I turned into an over-reacting emotional fool. It abated, but I've never really been the same since.
5. Courage.
This is really a 20/20 hindsight thing, but I realise now how much difference having children and related things in your life can make. I now look back with a kind of horror at the risks I took as a union rep in the 70s. Nowadays I suppose I'd be regarded as a "social justice warrior". The number of times I volunteered to be the one to march into an office or a meeting and put demands in front of senior managers who literally had the power to wreck my career, or even get me sacked, now makes me shudder. And I did similar stuff within the union run by more or less the same kind of men I dealt with at work. I just thought it was "the right thing to do" for people who needed someone to help them and went right ahead and did what had to be done. Perhaps I was already so far beyond the pale - simultaneously being one of those uppity feminists but also a "respectable married woman" - that anything I did was just another log on an already roaring fire and it didn't make a lot of difference even when it made me some real enemies.