“We may think of freedom not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.” – Peter Marshall
Who defines ‘right’? I believe we define “right” for ourselves. Sometimes our “rightness’ clusters with others who agrees, somewhat. Sometimes others most vehemently agree with our definition of “rightness”. But, the definition for what is RIGHT comes from within us. Our experiences help us define things. What we do not have direct experience with, we ASSUME. Our assumptions come from others, from our similar experiences, and from pure personal logic. Oh, yes, one other thing… we all have hidden agendas, as well, and our hidden agenda might make us say we believe sonneting is right, when we do not really feel it to our bones… but it fits with something we are not declaring.
We collect information by our senses as well. We can see a tree. We can smell the wood. We can feel the bark. We can taste the pine. We can hear the leaves rustling. We can close our eyes and infer what we think the tree looked like. The sensory experience helps is know things.
Again, we can know things physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, and should we speak to someone about the tree, they add in their idea of what a tree is. They agree, that is the tree and so now we have social agreement. And, yet, next year, the tree, when it springs out, will be different. Our sensory knowledge is vulnerable to change and we have to update our knowledge of that tree.
We can know a great deal, and that knowledge is personal, but we can never know the WHY of a tree. So we do not know it all, do we? We have to remember that our knowledge is not exactly what another’s knowledge is. Are either of us wrong? Are both of us wrong? No, we are both right in the way we know things. Or, we can both be totally off the mark.
Be open, sisterfriends. I know it is hard, sometimes, to admit someone is more knowledgeable than we are. Part of what are the world’s problems are, right now, a matter of rightness. So much is missed by us digging in our heels and declaring our rightness. Let us work to be open-minded. Can’t we give a little?
©Carol Desjarlais 4.3.23
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