My Mind’s Not Blank, It’s College Ruled

Being open-minded is commonly considered a desirable trait. Being empty-minded is not. Open-mindedness allows us to take new information, process the information however we might do that, and potentially change our course or direction. Wiktionary defines open-minded as “willing to consider new and different ideas or opinions.”

Sidebar: Interestingly, ironically, and even self-defining-ly, giving consideration to “open content” references, such as Wiktionary and Wikipedia, might be considered to be open minded.

Empty-mindedness on the other hand (if even possible) implies that we’re starting with nothing and creating from scratch. We’ve all heard the expressions, “clean slate,” “blank page,” and others that are intended to imply that there are no preconceived notions, no prejudices, and no biases. Well, that’s pretty difficult for us humans to accomplish – we all arrive at work or home or school or play with all of our previous experiences intact – yes, and even a few preconceived notions, prejudices, and biases. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The sum of our experiences, let’s call it wisdom, gives us some structure to evaluate new ideas, new information, and the opinions of others. That wisdom-structure gives us a place or places to put information; to assemble it in familiar ways that we recognize. Using familiar reference points allows us to rearrange the information in new and unfamiliar ways and thereby test new ways of thinking; sort of a layperson’s science project with constants and variables, i.e., things we cannot change and things we can.

If we can agree that our experiment with open-mindedness really should and must start with a bit of structure, let’s think of it as ruled paper; lines on a page for us to store our new information and then write and rewrite the results of our experiment. As a child and then as an adult, we are faced with choices as to the structure of our “unblank” page – wide ruled, college ruled, or narrow ruled. (I tend to like college ruled – college ruled is sort of the average of wide and narrow and generally suits my handwriting style).

So, then how do we go about being opened-minded and considering new and different ideas and opinions when we arrive with our own ideas and opinions and even our own “ruled” structure? We begin by knowing ourselves – knowing our biases and knowing how we best experiment and learn – knowledge is a beautiful thing. Then we acknowledge them, accept them, embrace them…and challenge them.

Don’t become too familiar with the familiar; when testing an idea, don’t forget to test yourself; and whether you’re college ruled or even three-hole punched, don’t be afraid to color outside the lines once in a while.