Rude Awakening

Have patience, patience is the key to all relief.

Rumi
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One of the great awakenings that seems to take some people many years to discover is that "I don't know" is a perfectly legitimate answer to a question if it is the correct one. Some people want answers right away and are unwilling to take the time to find them.

In my younger years I was treated with criticism if I didn't know the answers. So I developed a trick of coming up with an answer even if it was a wrong one. It seems it was better to be wrong than to be ignorant. People are afraid of being ignorant. But we are all ignorant about most things. Ignorance and stupidity are not the same thing. Someone once said, ignorance is curable, stupidity is not. A person should not be abused for not knowing something if they haven't had the opportunity to exercise the time, trouble or patience to find out.

There is another truism involved in the matter of ignorance which is that we all know more than we think we do. A quiz show contestant who is under a constraint might not come up with the answer. But if he was given time, without the stress, and with the patience to think about it, he might in fact draw up the answer from the recesses of his mind.

One day I was standing on a New York City subway platform by myself reading a newspaper. A woman approached me and asked if the train stopped at a particular station. I put down the paper and looked ahead to think about it. But in the next breath she said, in a very scornful voice "Well, if you don't know, don't guess."

The NY subway system is very complex and I have lived there most of my life. If she had given me a few moments to think about it I could have drawn up that particular line in my mind and given her an answer. My answer would have been "yes," "no" or "I don't know." But since she decided to be rude about it, I went back to my newspaper. I could have directed her to a map on the subway wall, but she hadn't purchased the right for that.

People deserve their own time and patience. "Why don't you know?" is not the right question. "What do you think?" is. I have seen that work with young high school students when I was training them for a radio program of their own. Without knowing the first thing about broadcasting, they arrived at some remarkably workable ideas. When I queried one boy about it he said "Nobody ever asks us what we think."

We are not "supposed to know" everything about life. It would be very boring if we did. Some problems get solved right away, others take time and some take a long time. But patience is one of the most important tools for getting to the answer of anything.

DB - The Vagabond
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Spring is a-comin' in.

WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)

Given the resources and opportunity, what one thing do you want to do in 2010 that you've never done before.

You have all Winter to answer. Answers will be posted on the first day of Spring.
20 responses so far.

DB - The Vagabond