Accept

Posted by yseult on Mar 2, 2007 in Personal | 1 comment

While I was talking to the phone to a very dear friend I hadn’t talked with for quite a while now, she said something simple, but interesting to me: you don’t need to have all the answers. (I’m leaving out the almost-yelling bit and the mild swearing that accompanied the rant for obvious reasons )

It sound like an easy thing to say and understand, some might consider it trivial even. As a ‘philosopher’ however we are trained to work everything out. It’s what we do, it’s our job, our work, our ultimate goal and our method to cope with the world.

As long as a problem can be well formulated, analyzed, dissected, taken apart and put back together again, we’re happy. Once we’re done dissecting a problem, an obstacle, a tricky situation or a spat, we think that the better part of a problem is already solved. That the rest is only cosmetics. Finding solutions is what we do and it does play tricks on us. It leads us to believe that naming a problem is part of the solution. That we virtually have all the answers.

The trouble here is not hubris, because a philosophical person would claim to have all the answers to all the questions. But, they would probably say that once you’ve named the problem, you’ve done the greatest step to solving it.
That’s all very good when dealing with theories about matter and intellect or formal logic, but when it comes to life, human beings tend to not be that rational at all.
It’s the well known discrepancy (hey, another big word to be added to the list…) between knowing that smoking is bad, but not stopping anyway. It’s the same discrepancy that leads to utter craziness in economical decision and game theory btw.
The fact that we can analyze why we’re feeling the way we do or why X annoys the hell out of us, does not necessarily mean that we can keep it from annoying us.
That’s probably the answer why so many academics have undiagnosed psychological disorders or problems: they think they can figure it all out by themselves. They think that knowing why they feel the way they do, solves their problem.

Accepting that we don’t need to have all the answers or solutions, that’s probably the real solution.