On Changing My Mind

One of my earliest memories is of walking into a bee’s nest. I was probably three. My dad grew peach trees, and he had warned me and my sister to be careful in the orchard because there were bees living in the ground. The way I recall, I was walking along and all of a sudden I noticed I was standing on top of a place in the ground with dozens, maybe hundreds of bees swarming all around.

I thought to myself something along the lines of, “Oh no! I didn’t do what my dad said; I wasn’t careful and now I’m in a bee’s nest…I guess now my only option is to kill all the bees!” and I started stomping on the bees, trying to kill them all.

After a few stomps, I realized, “I can’t kill them all — this isn’t working!” and ran as fast as I could towards the house. Somebody was on the porch, maybe my mom, maybe my dad. I can only imagine what it looked like to them — me running as fast as I could, maybe screaming, bees chasing after me. I made it to the porch and safety with no more than three stings, which seems like a small miracle to my adult self.

One thing I love about my three-year-old self is how quickly she changed her approach when she saw something wasn’t working. When avoidance didn’t work, she tried demolition. When demolition didn’t work, she tried escape.

As an adult, sometimes I find myself much more sluggish when it comes to discarding an approach and trying something new. I suspect it’s because I have an egoic preference for being right. Changing my mind indicates that I was wrong, so I will really explore all the options in depth before I give up something that I thought would work.

Exploring options before giving up isn’t necessarily a bad thing; sometimes projects hit road blocks or quagmires, and if I just gave up every time at the first sign of adversity, I would miss out on a lot of magnificent things in life. I do believe, though, that I have pendulum swung too far in the direction of hanging on to things that clearly aren’t working more often than is optimal.

I’d like to reincorporate some of my three-year-old self’s ability to change my mind on a dime and act on my new decision without being attached to what I used to think was right. I think I have enough life experience now that I can tell the difference between hanging on to something because it still has potential versus hanging on to something because I don’t want to be wrong.