When Dealing with Value issues: Do Research and Reflect on your Findings
“It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” Mark Twain
One of the best advantages of writing nonfiction articles is that we usually start by assuming something we know well and find out after researching that our conclusions do not support it.
Once we experience this, we realize how important research can become in thinking and acting.
I author articles in Medium once a week. To avoid being repetitive or -even worse- incoherent I have divided the work into two types:
Stories based on experience.
I describe how I felt while doing different jobs in my forty years of experience, what I have enjoyed while traveling, life experiences with my children and grandchildren, and terminal experiences, such as during the pandemic or due to chaotic political or cultural circumstances.
From Kate Farrel’s book: Story Power, I quote:
When I tell you the story of my life, I don’t have to do anything special-just tell the truth about it as I lived it. With all its ragged edges and loose ends, all the hurtful and the healing bits. When you tell me your story, I don’t have to do anything special: just listen, accept, reflect, and be amazed.
When I can see the difference between the event and my story about it, between the experience and my interpretation of it, I can begin to glimpse the many creative means by which I author my life. I am better aware that my experiences, like stories, have a beginning, a middle, and an end. My life, like all narratives, consists of plot, character, setting, and theme-the fundamental constituents of a story.
One needs to focus on the lessons learned and explore sentiments and reactions until it leads to a unique feeling you want to share with your readers.
These make up for our social conversations with relatives and friends and should be cherished, remembered, and shared.
From harboring ideas to tackling challenges.
This type of article becomes more challenging due to its value judgment. By doing research, one achieves a more balanced opinion. And sometimes, it surprises me when I compare my initial thought with the conclusion.
One of our colleagues on Medium, Andy Murphy, wrote:
From his article, I took Mark Twain’s famous quote included as a subtitle:
“It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so”.
“Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist. He is best known for his travel narratives, including The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi, as well as his adventure stories of boyhood, such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain’s work combines deep seriousness with satirical humor.” (source: Wikipedia)
From his numerous works, I take his travel narratives and his approach to life with a touch of humor as a framework to continue writing about subjects of my interest, most of which call for reading, research, and reflection.
The mother of all sciences, philosophy, and most social sciences come to our help. There remains the need to reflect on the challenges of our time to conclude, which will inevitably be subjective and relative.
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), one tends to think that reality and truth are finally within the reach of our mobile. However, there is no replacement for our judgment on any value subject: one needs to research, read, and reflect based on ethics, morals, and perception of reality.
