Changing Minds

Have you ever had the notion that you might be wrong? Did you ever wonder whether the thing you’ve been doing for the last decade is something you shouldn’t have started and certainly shouldn’t be continuing over the next decade? In that case, join the club. I too have doubts in my mind about the ways that I do things and I wish, at times, to change them.

This morning, I wondered about the way I wash my hair. Yesterday, I contemplated the way that I type. Last week, I started to read upside down because, yes, you guessed it: I decided that I’d been doing it all wrong. It’s not difficult to change, once you’ve made your mind up. What’s difficult, I suppose, is making your mind up. Oh, and getting through the first period of change where everything feels kinda weird.

Take, for example, this thing about typing differently. I now rest the screen of my laptop flat on the ground and tilt the keyboard up, so that it is resting on my shins. I forgot to mention: I am sitting cross-legged on the floor. In this position, my hands dangle naturally over the keyboard with my wrists being loose and supported by my lower legs. Once you get the angle right, nothing in the arms is straining or resting against hard surfaces, so there isn’t any chance of injuring anything over time. Plus, once you get used to the position, typing is actually a lot quicker, easier and more accurate. It’s almost as if I’ve changed to a more natural position. Change, in this sense, is good.

Then there’s the example of reading upside down. By this, I don’t mean that I hang from the ceiling like a bat. I simply mean that the book I’m reading is held so that the first line I read is at the bottom of the page and the last line is at the top. Try it now (well, after you’ve read this) and you’ll find that it’s not as difficult as you think. Your brain will adjust quite quickly and, after a short while, you’ll be able to read just as quickly as the other way around. Change gives you the perspective that there’s actually no wrong way to go about things. There are merely different ways.

I’ll skip the other example for now (but reserve the right to write an indecently long post about it at some later date). For now, your takeaway point is that we chose to do things a certain way because we’ve made an arbitrary decision at some point in the past and we’ve gotten stuck with it. So, feel free to unstick yourself.

(Now you can go and get a book and read it upside down.)

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