more open

I went through a phase when I was little where I refused to eat a sandwich that had anything on it besides cheese and Miracle Whip. I wanted nothing to do with lunch meat, and was not about to let it intrude onto my “perfectly” made cheese sandwich (if you can even call in a sandwich). One night, however, I distinctly remember getting home late from town with my mom, and she made a sandwich for me with ham. For whatever reason, I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, the addition of ham to my cheese sandwich was quite good. In fact, I liked it so much that I never had another cheese and Miracle Whip sandwich. My definition of what tasted good drastically changed after I was more open to experience something new.

Have you ever met a “my way or the highway” type of person? No matter what you say, they will never change their mind. It feels like you’re talking to a brick wall. They won’t be open to anything that isn’t what they already think, and there’s no changing their mind. While we aren’t all like that, each of us has our topics that we can get stubborn about. For me, it was my sandwiches. My idea of a sandwich, and my severe lack of experience in the culinary world, led me to have to be very narrow-minded about lunch meat. My stubbornness about my cheese sandwiches only led to me being deprived of the wonderfulness of lunch meat. Even though it’s silly to think about this example of not being open about putting ham on a sandwich, I can’t help but correlate it to all of the different opportunities we can experience and learn from that we reject just because we think what we already have and know is enough. Thinking that your own experiences and beliefs are the only ones that are of value in the world is really just living in oblivion, because all of us have something to learn about still.

One way we can start to be more open, and therefore allow ourselves to get a better and broader understanding of the world, is to surround ourselves with people that think differently than us. By no means is this the end of the story, however. The biggest step is to have difficult conversations with those individuals who have a different worldview than us, because that’s where we will be able to grow in perspective. The toughest conversations are likely the ones we should treasure most, because they will open our eyes to things we’ve never experienced personally. Challenging conversations are so beneficial, but we have to be willing to put ourselves into a position of vulnerability to have them. We have to be open to having them in the first place, and then seek to let our perspective be changed when presented with new compelling information. I think there’s often a negative connotation with people changing their beliefs, but we have to remember that beliefs are shaped by experiences. When we have new experiences, our beliefs can change, no matter how long we’ve held them to be true.

I think it’s time we all give ourselves and those around us the grace to learn and change as we are exposed to new perspectives, and I also think it’s time for each of us to be ready to be open to those new perspectives. Undoubtedly, we will discover that we were wrong or mislead about certain things, but it’s much better to discover the awesomeness of lunch meat than to keep eating cheese sandwiches.

What do you need to be more open to discovering this week?

There’s more to being open.

There’s more to it all.