I was struck by Stacy Allison’s (first woman to summit Mt. Everest) comment in her book, Beyond the Limit, that in her early rock climbing days she decided “to forget what I already knew for the sake of everything that I needed to discover”.
WOW! I began to wonder how that practice might impact me on a daily basis.
What would it be like if I forgot how to use the cards in this image?
What new creative use might I find for a deck of cards or how might I interpret “aces” differently?
Then I considered, what would it be like if I forgot how to complain?
Or how to ASSUME I know what a friend or relative is thinking or why they are acting in a certain way. The old story about the man on the subway train with the wild kids is a good reminder.
As the story goes (I believe when I heard it I knew it to be true; doesn’t matter)… a man on a subway train with four kids was oblivious to their wild behavior. Another passenger who was especially annoyed by the shrill screams, taunting each other and bumping into her (rattling her newspaper), finally said to the man angrily, “don’t you have any control of your children?" The father asked his kids to calm down, quit the wildness and then explained apologetically to the other passenger that they were returning home from a nearby hospital where his wife, their mother, had just passed away.
The previously upset passenger turned compassionate instantly and realized that she had made an assumption … had judged the dad as an unrefined, incompetent parent.
How differently might she have responded had she forgotten what she thought she knew?
Where would it be helpful if you could forget what you already know?
What might you discover?
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