“We are on a forever-changing journey and you will never be the exact same YOU that you are right at this exact moment in time. Life is forever flowing, it’s full of ups and downs and we’re constantly adapting as humans to accommodate for that change.” – Zenny Middleton

It’s a busy night in San Francisco, and I’m sharing a Lyft line with another woman and a female driver. Up and down the city’s crowded streets we go. Multiple routes to our destination present themselves, and the driver seems unsure of which one will be the fastest. Her indecision leads her to put her turn signal on, only to cancel it. A few blocks later, she does this once more. The woman passenger makes no attempt to hide her displeasure about this:

“First you’re gonna go left, then you’re not. Then you’re about to go right, but you drive straight.” She shakes her head in exasperation.

I understand where she’s coming from … at least I think I do. I too have been inconvenienced by chronic mind-changers. I’ve been hurt by people whose feelings shifted shape. Sometimes their passionate attention wrapped me in their orbit one day, only to swiftly change course and flow to another place where I had no business. 

I see the virtue in staying strong in one’s convictions. I also see the unrealisticness of the expectation to maintain constant certainty. Feelings are complicated. Minds do change.

Too often, though, for fear of appearing “soft,” fallible or the dreaded wishy-washy, people cling tightly to beliefs or decisions long after they have begun to show initial cracks.

In our culture, we’re told to take pride in our actions. To self-scrutinize is to admit insecurity. To change course connotes indecisiveness and weakness.

There are many sides to a story

Refusal to back down helps promote a sense of group cohesiveness. It helps people feel like their bonds with one another are stronger. Sarah Schulman, in her book Conflict Is Not Abuse, highlights how “cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept.”

But on the other hand, according to author Cynthia Cruz, “The insistence on knowing has traces of fascism in it—the inclination to align or avow rather than to stay in the question, rather than to step back and wonder.”

Think of the frat boy who brushes past an older lady without apologizing, then scarfs down a hamburger—thoughtlessly leaving behind crumbs and trash for the staff to later clean up. He holds himself in high esteem. He is the antithesis of the self-questioner, content with, if not smugly proud of himself.

Think of the people like him who zip on by with blinders on, content with themselves in their self-encased worlds.

Revision in response to new information—or after thinking through a many-sided issue more thoroughly—can be a sign of psychological health and flexibility. Along those lines, Eric J. Chaisson writes, in a November 2018 letter to The Atlantic titled “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs?”: “Ideas change as data accumulates. If future evidence causes me to change my mind again, that’s OK. That’s how the scientific method works, always revising what we thought we knew.”

All humans have Blind Spots. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we don’t consider certain facts. Time brings them into clearer focus.

Author Matthew Fray suggests, “Constantly remind yourself that you’re a fallible human with a faulty brain that is shedding more and more brain cells every day. To choose to be a little less certain, every day, all of the time.”

“Sorry Ma’am,” the driver says to the passenger. “I just wasn’t sure which route was best.” I want to tell her, “It’s OK—none of us do.”

Like the woman passenger, I too have wished that so many of us weren’t stumbling across this planet with little sense of direction, holding maps that are constantly changing. I too have craved consistency and dependability. 

At the same time, particularly in my younger years, I have also been one of those stumblers myself. I haven’t always known which route to take. I’ve started on one, only to acquire new information that prompted a shift in course. That information helped me realize it wasn’t the most promising path to take after all—but I never would have known until embarking on it with my own two feet.

I wonder if the driver viewed herself as a fellow stumbler.

Either way, author George Saunders has written, “In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure.”

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image 1 Patty Jansen from Pixabay 2 image by Eris from Pixabay 

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