I’m always on the lookout for the currents underlying life, events, emotions, and societies. What we once considered taboo, we now practice in the streets and what once we did carelessly, we look back upon with shame.
When I meet a person who says this is this and that is that, I’m always cautious because their opines do not take history into account. History is not the same as today, it is different. If yesterday was different than today, then we can reason that tomorrow will be different than today. Yet, when you are stuck in today, your universe becomes very small, and ignorance becomes foundational to your thinking.
Everyone has taken pause at some time in their life to reflect. For some, it may be immediately after the subject of reflection, such as whether they should have made that financial commitment. For some, it may be decades after, perhaps reflecting upon their own parental mistakes and comparing them to those of their parents. Reflection is key to connecting the appropriate dots to create a picture. We all may have different mental pictures of the same subject in the end, but there are those who do not have pictures at all.
Active reflection is not requisite either, though it’s vitally important. But when your mind is quiet, it works without your intercession, connecting dots you didn’t know existed. However, it’s in active reflection that epiphanies reside and paradigm shifts are bred.
How much reflection do we need? I do not believe there is an answer for that. Some people reflect on one subject their whole lives, hoping to know every detail to the highest level knowable. Some are pulled to reflect on many subjects. It stands to reason, the more you reflect on a subject and it’s collateral connections, the more knowledge you will have about it.
These are simple fundamentals of life: it changes and its knowledge requires reflection.
We are now in the information age. Some could conclude that it is the polar opposite of the age of reason as one promotes reflection and the other consumption. But with all things, polar opposites are useless unless connected to each other. A magnet serves many purposes in our world, but it cannot exist without both the repulsion of the poles as well as the connection of the poles.
Our society has not, of yet, discovered the balance between these poles. We know they repulse, but how do we truly connect the vast amount of information we consume to the necessity of reflection to turn those subjects into knowledge? I cannot believe we are condemned to move society forward superficially with only the briefest of moments spent on reflection and reason and the rest spent on consumption. We have seen what such a balance does to the body when analogously seen with food. Too much consumption and not enough reflection will make us fat with information that will, in the end, cause more damage to our system.
I posit, however, that this balance represents our society today. We are consuming vast amounts of information at such speeds that it overwhelms our ability to reflect on that information.
In all things and in every lesson, there must be balance. So too must we, as today’s society, find balance with information in greater reflection to heal our system that is damaged with the fat of that information, superficial, and unreflected and is seen through the symptoms of a life sped up to the speed of consumption and not balanced to the speed of reflection, showing itself as overload, stress, frustration, lack of attention, lack of thought, spontaneous and dangerous decisions, and poor stewardship of the planet.
In all things, balance.
