This week, I published my first book. (you can buy it here!)
I say my first book, because I plan to publish again. I want to write books for adults and books for children. I want to write about things that are hard to talk about. I want to say real things to real people and let them know that I see them, I value them, and I believe in them.
My perspective comes from my lived experience and what I have learned through that experience. I write to help me understand those experiences and to process my learning. Learning happens in the spaces where we are challenged – where we evaluate what we believe we know against some new learning. Throughout history, new learning and new experiences have frightened people. Look at Galileo (forced by the Catholic Church to recant his theory that the Earth rotated around the sun) or the medical treatment of bloodletting (used through the late 19th c.) or how we teach children to read (pre-service teacher programs all over the country are still not training teachers in the Science of Reading): when we learn, we grow our thinking and our capacity to understand our world.
If everyone is open to new learning, how is there so much division in what we understand to be the truth?
This question is extremely real to me. I am surrounded by people who see the truth differently than I do, so I went looking to understand how this happens. What I found is that we actually apply our bias to new learning. We use motivated reasoning, according to Peter Ditto, Ph. D., to pick which facts we listen to and how we interpret those fact. He goes on to say, “People are capable of being thoughtful and rational, but our wishes, hopes, fears and motivations often tip the scales to make us more likely to accept something as true if it supports what we want to believe.” (https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/05/alternative-facts)
We spend so much energy trying to ensure conformity. What if we invested that energy into developing the skills we all need to be empathetic, accepting human beings? Empathy begins with a willingness to learn – to see that there is more than one right answer.
So here’s to a willingness to learn; an openness to things we are unsure about. Here’s to those who are willing to write their way toward understanding and valuing different perspectives. And here’s to those who are brave enough to encourage questions rather than blindly accepting the past as the future.