Write about an experience that changed a long held belief you had. (reach-back to 2013)
From November 22, 2013:
“Don’t ever change.” Such an inscription is probably scribbled inside your school yearbooks. But letting a single event change you, your beliefs, doesn’t make any sense to me. Isn’t one of the signs of terminal adulthood that you lose your snap judgement?
I’ve changed my mind on several different “major” issues as I’ve aged. 22 year-old me probably would think mid-30s me is pretty lame. Maybe I’m just an old conformist.
(No, I was never a goth kid. Wouldn’t have been able to pull that one off, either.)
That said, I understand there’s situations where acting against my original intention is the correct thing to do. “Steer into the skid.” Another thing many young people won’t understand with the ubiquity of front-wheel drive. (Though I suppose it’s true on a bicycle, too. I could ask, but it’d require more than conversation in passing. And how do I avoid the evangelistic sermon? Riding a bike is probably more perilous for me than driving a car. With my vision the way it is, I do neither.)
Back to this after I got distracted by a work-type thing. Then, once again, my work phone was ringing.
I’m not sure what I was thinking when I kind of pushed this one away six years ago. Maybe I was afraid to say.
Now, though, I am willing to admit I was wrong, and change my perspective when presented with new evidence.
Sometimes I’ll find myself coming around to a position I would have never thought I’d hold.
The two things that come immediately to mind are abortion and capitol punishment. I used to be kind of okay with the former, and resigned to the latter. Today, I find myself opposed to both.
No, it’s not a religious thing; I still don’t go to church. But the positions I’ve taken are certainly influenced by the Church’s teachings. For abortion, there’s ways you can keep from forming babby if you want to make sure you don’t do that. For killing people, it’s just that I think it’s a power the state should never have.
The steering-in-to-a-skid thing was really more about what people are accustomed to doing. Professionally, I’ve seen User Acceptance Testing fail because people didn’t want to update documentation. There’s four places where the user is instructed to enter data. There’d better be four places in the next version, even if two of those four aren’t actually needed anymore. But they’re still there to keep the documentation correct. *eyeroll*
I could probably tie these things back to common core tenets. The whole don’t-kill-people is a controversial one, sure.
*yawn*
Two days this week. Three the next. I am so tired.