2x4
- Lucian@going2paris.net
- Sep 16, 2021
- 1 min read
Charlottesville
September 16, 2021
I get that some - perhaps many - people find these aphorisms tiresome and a waste of time. I am not one of those. I enjoy how much wisdom is shared in so few words.
I have read this card many times over the years. Today I had a reaction to it that I have not had before - that these words are another way of defining the growth mindset.
For too long I labored understand the misguided belief that I am who I am. That my DNA defined who I am and that my characteristics, attitudes and skills were fixed and there wasn’t much - in fact, nothing - I could do to expand beyond
them.
But we can become who we want to become. And this card identifies several of the ways we can do that. In a potential obtuse way, that’s what “anchors up” means to me. That I can jettison those thoughts that no longer serve me and find new ones that do help me live the life I want to live.
I am giving myself a C for how I have expressed my thoughts here. Damn words seem inadequate. I’ll keep trying to express myself more precisely.
The 2x4 reference? I am referring to how this card hit me upside my head today.
For more than a century, the "science" of psychology has gotten it wrong. Human nature is not a battle/combination/dichotomy of nature vs. nurture -- it is a combination of nature (genetics), nurture (our experiences), and HUMAN WILL. Dennis Prager, Jordan Peterson, and many others you quote have it right -- The Divine Spark that God gave us was Free Will. A lion cannot choose to be a vegan; an ant cannot advocate for a four-day work week in his colony; a parrot cannot whistle an opera s/he has never heard. Only we can rise above our genetics and our "learned" experiences to choose to be better (or worse) than we are today.....