What If I'm Wrong?

After fifty-plus years of navigating this crazy world we live in, I’ve come to at least one unmistakable conclusion:

I’m exhausted.

During my youth, I was either too naïve or too indifferent to the challenges of being human. Then I woke up a bit and realized it was going to take some serious effort from me to make some sense of the internal struggles and external demands that make life hard. Unfortunately, I allowed the pendulum to swing again, and I became disillusioned with all the frustrations of humanity. I disengaged once again and let myself drift through life, which gave me an artificial sense of peace and quiet. I won’t go into all the ways I failed at doing that here and now.

However, during the last decade or so, the chaos in my head and within our society has no longer felt like the elephant in the room, but more like a Tasmanian Devil tearing the house down. The daily, incessant noise of every belief, bit of news, or “truth” being systematically challenged, questioned and attacked had me wanting to separate even further from it, and from myself.

After some struggling, and eventually spiraling, I was introduced to practicing mindfulness. These techniques allowed me to open my eyes and tune in to the conversation happening inside my own head, and most importantly, not to label or judge my thoughts. Slowing the mental and emotional noise started to create room for questions I’d never quite contemplated the same way before. These questions organically introduced new ones. The new quiet calm and intentionality that I was more often able to find was freeing. The ability to deliberately and systematically investigate my beliefs truly began for the first time. This journey continues almost every day.

Looking back at my life, I had accumulated family influence, lessons, education, cultural and religious influence, experiences, successes, failures, biases, assumptions, trusted authorities, and I had come to conclusions. This new realization opened an uncomfortable door that I could no longer avoid walking through. I realized that I had not yet found the awareness or guts to explore what I had actually built from my accumulated beliefs. They had gradually become mine, but I had yet to stop and deliberately determine exactly why I believed them, or whether my perceived confidence in them was justified.

I suddenly realized the irony. I was so tired of listening to everyone out there challenge and debate every belief, when maybe I had never challenged my own beliefs seriously enough myself.

It hit me like a truck.

Do I deserve the confidence I have in what I think I believe when I’ve never given the focused time, attention and effort needed to genuinely understand these consequential beliefs?

That question has kept me up many nights. I’ve decided that the only way to possibly know is to thoroughly examine those beliefs myself. I’m going to pull them apart, investigate where they actually came from, and turn them inside out. Then I’ll attempt to put them back together and see what holds up.

They might make sense, or they might not. They might stay the same. They might not. They might become even stronger. Sometimes the most honest answer might be:

“I’m not sure anymore.”

If genuine exploration raises more questions, this might be one of the most productive answers of all. This could be the beginning of understanding myself better. Not so I can defend my views to someone else, but because I need to learn as much as I can for myself.

I promise you two things:

• I have not already decided where this will end. I will go wherever it leads me.

• As I explore these topics for myself, I will let you know what the examination leaves me believing, doubting, changing, holding on to, or if I’m not able to resolve it yet.

This won’t be comfortable for me, but I’m finished floating through life, guarding my confidence.

I’m sharing this because I suspect I’m not the only person who has wondered how my beliefs formed, what they’re actually built on, whether I’ve earned the confidence I have in them, and whether they actually survive genuine examination. Maybe you’ve genuinely done that already. But maybe you’ll come across a question or perspective you’ve never considered.

I’m definitely not asking you to change your beliefs or agree with me.

I want to ask something harder:

What If We’re Wrong?

Maybe we’re not.

Are we willing to find out?