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“Out beyond the field of right-doing and
wrong-doing
there is a field, I'll meet you there."
~ Rumi ~
More
Than One Right Answer by Leslie Karen Sann
Look around the room you are in, or if you are
enjoying the beautiful outdoors scan the environment and make a mental
note of everything that is the color green.
Don't read further until you have done it.
Did you find lots of green? I'm sitting outside and
the world is full of green at the moment.
Now, without doing another thing, as soon as you
finish reading the next sentence, close your eyes. As soon as you shut
your eyes bring to mind everything in your environment that is brown.
Okay, open your eyes and look around. How'd ya do?
If you're like most people, you probably didn't
identify many of the brown objects at all. That's because there are
something like 4 billion bits of data coming into the brain in every
second and as humans we only process about 2000 bits. Since you had been
looking for green, brown was ignored.
Yet brown was in your environment the whole time.
The thing is we are limited in how much we can
process. How we are programmed in the moment, or how we are situated,
influences how we sort incoming data.
Let me give you another example. Let's say we are
sitting in my kitchen facing each other at the table. From your vantage
point you can see the fireplace in the den. I can't see it at all because
I'm looking out the kitchen window which you cannot see. I tell you there
is a window and you say, no there isn't. You tell me there is a fireplace
and I tell you you are nuts. In my view of reality there is no such thing.
Who is right?
We both are. Neither one of us can see 360 degrees
in any one moment. We each see only a piece of the whole.
Sometimes we are so convinced we are right. And we
probably are. Yet there is probably another right answer as well. And
another, and another, and another.
Yet there is room for you and for me. Where I'm not
wrong and you're not right nor I am right and you are wrong. Instead, we
are both right! What a concept. More than one right answer.
Now the question is how do we negotiate a third
right answer -- one that includes both of us. It's called the new math:
1+1=3.
QUICK LINKS:
COPYRIGHT/CONTACT INFO/REPRINT PERMISSION
Copyright 2010 by Leslie Karen Sann, Living by Design
Visit this link for contact information:
leslie@living-bydesign.com
Reprint permission granted in part or whole when the following credit appears in full:
Copyright 2010 by Leslie Karen Sann,
Living by Design. All rights reserved.
Web site. http://www.living-bydesign.com
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