🧵 Thursday Thread: When have you changed your mind?

I hope you don’t think less of me for beliefs I once held, or the ones I hold now

I really liked our MFA thread last week! It wasn’t one of our busiest threads—which makes sense. Not everyone here cares about the question of whether an MFA is worth the time and money. But, those of you who did have thoughts shared such insightful observations of not just MFAs, but also writing, learning, growing, and finding our way with our without an MFA path. So, thank you!

As you know, I’ve been on kind of a kick with that theme of how we learn and grow as artists, in community and alone, as evidenced by yesterday’s essay, “The Problem With Writing Instruction,” which felt like a companion piece the post, “Do Writing Teachers Prey on People’s Dreams?,” and taken together with last week’s MFA thread, these posts offer a rich conversation about the writing life and how we find our way into and through it.

Again, thank you!

Today I’m interested in something a little more philosophical, which is, how do we change our minds? Especially when it comes to things that matter? Because the fact is, humans are resistant to changing our minds, and perhaps even more so now than in the past.¹ And yet, it seems of urgent importance that we protect and exercise our mental flexibility, our capacity for seeing/learning/experiencing something new and incorporating that into our belief system.

I teach writing on the foundation of Keats’s theory of negative capability, which means something different from how it sounds, because it is decidedly not negative. As Keats defined it, negative capability is the ability to tolerate (or dwell in, as he put it) uncertainty, befriend it, and allow ourselves to stay in uncertainty without reaching too quickly facts and answers. He said this capacity, this negative capability, is a crucial quality for artists. He also said it is the pathway to seeing beyond what we already know, or think we know, in order to recognize something new, something previously beyond our first impression, or even beyond our previous ability to perceive.

Again, Keats deemed negative capability a crucial quality for artists, including writers like himself, and I wholeheartedly agree. I also am aware, as you surely are, as well, that this ability to see beyond what we know or think we know is really hard in the current climate of highly polarized politics and seemingly insurmountable cultural and social divides. In environments like the one we’re in right now, it gets harder and harder to see past what we think we know—and the algorithms that decide what we see on a daily basis just further cement our commitment to protect what we think we know rather than revisit it.

And I’m not talking about shifting core valules of kindness, decency, equal human rights for all, compassion, integrity, protection of the earth and those who have already been marginalized and harmed. I don’t see myself “seeing beyond” these core values. But I also wonder, if we can’t see past what we think we know, then what? What happens to us then?

This raises the question of when and how we’re willing to change our minds—when and how have we changed our minds in the past, and why? And did the shift in perception make things better, or worse?

I’ll go first—because even though I thought initially that I haven’t changed my mind much in my life, it turns out, on closer reflection, that I have. Here are some examples I can think of:

1. I used to think divorce reprented failure. Even for many years after my own divorce, that belief lingered. Now, though, I see things differently. I feel that the real failure in divorce is how our patriarchical and misogynistic culture defines marriage and family, as well as the binary thinking on relationships; i.e., if it lasts, it’s successful, and if it ends, it’s a failure. I no longer believe in that binary. I don’t dismiss the idea (or the beauty) of committing to one person for a lifetime, but no longer do I see that as the main measure of success for intimate partnerships. As I see it now, the continuum of ways to be together and ways to learn from relationship is so much richer and more nuanced than that.

2. I used to think parents were far more influential in how their adult children “turn out” than I now believe. I do think parents are influential, but it’s much more complicated than nature vs. nurture. Again, a false binary. Truer is that so many environmental factors beyond parenting contribute to the “nurture” category, and those factors, as soon as a young person reaches adolescence, include extremely powerful peer influence. As far as I understand the research, peers become more influential than parents around the age of 10. And of course if we don’t talk about socioeconomic and racial disparities, we’re missing the picture. Parents are influential, but not, in my view, nearly as influential as I once believed. And, as a side note, watching my grandson Zavior grow up is definitely underscoring my newer perceptions about parents. It’s so easy to see in Z, who is adopted, the aspects of him that have nothing to do with B or any of us, both in his greatest gifts and his frailties.

3. I used to think—back in my twenties, mind you—that infidelity was always grounds for the end of a marriage. Now, having been married twice for 36 years in total, I just don’t think it’s that simple. Now, I think the only people who know anything about a marriage are the people inside of it, and the array of situations and factors that make a relationship healthy or fulfilling are malleable.

4. I used to think total pacifism was possible. Now, I don’t know.

5. I used to think high-school kids should have jobs. Like, I felt pretty strongly about this. Now, I absolutely feel differently. I am not saying high-school kids should not have jobs, I’m just saying I no longer think that a high-school job is some kind of moral training ground for being a hardworking person who knows the value of money. I think a high-school job is just a job, some of them valuable, maybe, and some of them not.

6. That belief about high-school jobs as a moral training ground, I brought with me from my working-poor background, which also taught me that the best way to succeed is on your own merit, and that people who get help along the way are “cheating.” I no longer believe this whatsoever. I believe that was a myth that I (and so many others from working-poor backgrounds) bought into becuase it was fed to me, and seemed appealing somehow. Now, I know that this myth keeps poor people isolated and ashamed that even their best efforts to pull themselves up by their bootstraps aren’t working. What a cruel joke. As soon as I began teaching in a fancy private arts school, I saw how all of the wealthy families helped each other’s children—especially with mentorships, jobs, job referrals, and so forth. Like, all of them. And I realized the whole make your own fortune thing has been a hoax all along. That’s not to say no one has ever done it. Obvioiusly, some people have made their own fortunes. But it’s not morally superior to being helped, and nor is success as measured by career or financial achievement a common or guaranteed outcome of hard work.

7. On another note, I used to be proud of my knowledge of grammar (which is good, but actually not exceptional). I used to take some pleasure in seeing “mistakes.” Mind you, this was, like, a long time ago! More than a decade. Anyway. it made me feel knowledgeable and useful to think I knew grammar better than most people. Now, I see the language as a living entity that changes and grows in response to the ways we use it. Take for example the fact that periods at the ends of texts (and comments, too) can be seen as angry. Or the evolving use of exclamation points to ensure our mood is not misread. These are adaptations to the amount of digital communicaiton we rely on now, where no facial expressions or vocal tones help convey our meaning. We’ve had to let grammar adapt to fill that gap. And in that sense, I really love grammar, still. It’s beautiful to me how we can use grammar to create meaning. But I don’t think we need to know the “rules” necessarily in order to do that. I think we mostly need to be awake.

Okay, I shared a bunch. I hope you don’t think less of me for beliefs I once held, or the ones I hold now. I’m just curious about how our beliefs evolve, and why.

So, have you ever changed your mind about some belief you held—whether an important one or a seemingly unimportant one? For example, Billie was convinced for years that they hated stuffing. It took a lot of effort for me to convince them to try it, but once they did …

Love,

Jeannine

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