Friday reflection
Holding ideas loosely
Hello, dear readers -
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Venu Gupta, which I shared in two parts earlier this week (read part one and part two). She is fascinating and inspiring and the latest source of my gratitude for the work that I do, which brings me into contact with such mighty women around the globe. Paid subscribers, thank you for your support, which helps me carve out time to have conversations like these and then turn them into edited, image-enhanced newsletters for you to read!
The theme for this week’s reflection is “holding ideas loosely.” It dropped in for me this morning as I listened to the Indigo Girls (or, for younger readers, “that band that Barbie listened to in the car”)(I remember being horrified when a younger friend of mine hadn’t heard of the Indigo Girls. HADN’T HEARD OF THEM! But I digress…).
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Snippet from “Closer to Fine”
by the Indigo Girls
“There's more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine, yeah”
Listen to the whole song, if you don’t know it, or even if you do — it’s a great song:
Inspired by this quote, I find myself thinking about:
The moment in the second part of my conversation with Venu where she says that maybe the world looking the same to all of us is not the goal.
A conversation I had with the amazing Suzanne Ehlers where she referenced a favorite quote of mine:“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.”
- Rainer Marie Rilke
A class I took in college with the amazing Al Filreis. Inspired by a book called Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Eduction by Gerald Graff, Al would have us come into class, read a position statement he’d prepared (inspired by whatever short story we’d just read, all on the theme of what makes a community), and then choose where to sit in the room based on our point of view.
Agree with the statement? Sit by the window. Disagree? Sit by the door. At the beginning of the semester, many of us sat in the middle, because we could see both sides. Al taught us that in Germany, all the people who “sat in the middle” helped the Nazis murder millions of Jewish people. Intellectual and even moral integrity comes from taking a position, listening, and being willing to change your position if someone or something changes your mind.
In other words: integrity comes from holding your ideas loosely. This notion may seem to be at odds with the whole point of Mighty Forces, which is to get more women to give voice to their ideas (and stories, and questions, and learnings, and, and…). But if you think about Al’s class, holding ideas loosely isn’t about keeping your ideas quiet — it’s about voicing them while simultaneously understanding, accepting, even embracing, that they may very well change. Because we all change, constantly. Life is change.
Our media culture makes it hard to hold ideas loosely. Politicians who hold ideas loosely are accused of “flip-flopping.” And plenty of news sites and social media accounts love the big “aha!” moment of finding digital evidence that someone once said something contrary to a more current statement; if we disagree with the current position, we might take a kind of perverse pleasure in this discovery, but if we agree with it, we might feel more forgiving (“Oh, they said that years ago….”).
What if we gave ourselves permission to change our minds — to live into the answers? And what if we gave each other that same permission? What if being ardent about a particular point of view did not mean chaining yourself to it in handcuffs for the rest of your life?
I think our culture, and all of us, would be a whole lot healthier. And I think a lot of women would feel safer expressing themselves, because it wouldn’t feel like every single thing we said or wrote was being etched into a permanent record that an unforgiving review board would scrutinize at great length.
What do you think?
You are a mighty force
- Amanda
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