Blind Devotion
Posted: Monday, June 22, 2009
by Dianne Lehmann
Artisan Jewelry from SyZyGy
A woman walks up to her local 99 cent store. She has been there at least a hundred times before. She pushes on the front door to enter the shop and the door does not open. In the past, it has always opened when she pushed on it. She pulls out her cell phone and checks the time. Yes, she is there within the shop's normal operating hours, so why isn't the door opening? She thinks that they must have locked it for some reason.
She pushes again on the door and it does not open. Now she is really confused. She does not know that just yesterday, the old door and door frame which allowed the door to swing both out and in had been replaced with a door and frame which only allow the door to swing out. Will our poor confused woman realize that she has to let go of what she knew about the door in order to enter the store?
Once, when I was in high school, my mother was in the process of doing something I had seen her do a thousand times. For the first time, it occurred to me that there was a more efficient way to do it. Please don't ask me to remember what it was, that is lost to me, but not the principle I learned that day. When I pointed out to her the way that would save her time and effort, she looked at me and basically said that her way was the way her mother always did it and that she had always done it that way and that was good enough. And that may well have been the case. But in my teenagerly way, I told her that I would not be doing it her and her mother's way. That didn't go over all that well. There were more than a few, "Oh you think you're so smarts" thrown into the ensuing soliloquy.
Ideally, my mother would have looked at my suggestion, considered how it might fit into her regimen and adopted it or discarded it based on its inherent worth or lack thereof. But she did not. She dismissed it out of hand as not being the way it was done. And that was the turning point for me.
Still, I fell into the same trap of the familiar that we all do. When Bernd and I were first married, I set up our kitchen in much the same manner of organization as my mother's kitchen. It took quite a while before I found that it wasn't really working for me. But eventually I began a process of moving things about, changing what was in which drawer and cabinet, until it was much more efficient; at least to my way of thinking.
We can be blindly devoted to a lot of different things; not just a way of doing something. We can be devoted to a particular world view, ideas about values (what is good and what is bad), morals (what is right and what is wrong), thoughts about how others should best be spending their time, a spouse who is mistreating us but that we just can't seem to leave, what is and is not appropriate to eat for breakfast, how others should treat us, and the list is endless.
The world and our situations are changing all the time. We can either change with it, adjust our viewpoint and throw out the blind devotion, or get left outside of the local 99 cent store with some passing stranger wondering about our state of mind.
This Article has been viewed 1,975 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)Excellent article! Very well done, Dianne.Hi Michael.Your articles always either amuse (I printed out the one about the customer and the parking ticket for my husband to take to work) me or give me a lot to think about. They are always well done and so I am grateful for your praise of mine.Dianne
Hi Dianne, nicely done. Great points to ponder. Kuddos to you for another amazing write. Love and hugs, TeresaHi Teresa.Thanks so much. I can't take all the credit though. Maybe one day I will tell you what real life occurrence prompted me to write it. I think that you do an excellent job of taking daily occurrences and finding and relating the lessons to be learned from them.Love and hugs back at you,Dianne
Awesome insights here, Dianne.Hi Ken.Thanks.Sometimes life slaps you in the face and you can't help but take notice. :)Thanks for reading and commenting.Dianne
We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.