Open-mindedness: Post 3

Our third post on open-mindedness, written by Hanna and also published in her blog: A Little Blog About Words

Unfortunately it’s quite difficult to avoid sounding like a lecturing know-it-all when you are writing about big issues such as tolerance and acceptance. These are such important and thought-provoking topics which everyone has their own opinions on and if you are not careful it is easy to sound as if you think that you have it all figured out and everyone else needs to learn from you. I have really tried to avoid this, but I still suspect that a few of you who have read mine and Sebastian’s posts might have thought that we seem to be very full of ourselves. That is not at all our intention and I think that we are both very aware of how far away we still are from our ideal of reaching a completely open-minded state. Personally, I find that my wish to be open is being challenged on a regular basis and particularly some things are difficult to embrace. In this third post I therefore thought that I would write a little bit about one area where I find myself being too close-minded sometimes.

If you don’t know any other way, you are likely to believe that the way you are living is the “correct way”. Therefore, for most people the attitudes we hold are deeply rooted in our childhood and the environment we grew up in. For me, growing up was largely about discovering that there were other ways to live in and that there were many cultures where the norms were completely different from those I was used to. In fact, even your next-door neighbours may be living differently from you.
In my case, one thing that has shaped me a lot is that I grew up in a family where both parents worked and the household chores were split equally. Both my parents value equality and happen to have been fairly successful at what they do, so they decided together that they wanted to divide the workload at home equally between them. Because of this, I found it difficult for a long time to be open-minded to more traditional homes where the wife is more involved in child-care and cooking, while the dad is responsible for earning money. This is probably a quite unusual example of close-mindedness; usually people talk about the opposite situation when someone thinks that women “should know their place” etc. but I think that it is important that I really make it clear that in my mind “open-mindedness” is all about respecting other people’s choices and realising that there are several right ways of doing things. Therefore, any type of failure to accept others’ lifestyles counts as close-mindedness.

Beginning to discuss equality and family arrangements with friends and family, as well as reading and hearing what people had to say about it in the media opened my eyes to the fact that sometimes you can be equal without having to take care of the exact same things. In some families the parents make the mutual decision that the mum will stay at home because she prefers that and she doesn’t get as much money from working anyway.

When I moved to England I also found out how difficult it is to stay at home with children and still keep your job here. When you give birth, your boss basically expects you to be back at work as soon as you have healed enough. If you are a man you have next to no chance at all to stay at home with your newborn and remain employed. If you like many parents, feel opposed to the idea of hiring a nanny, a common solution is therefore that the mother becomes a stay at home mum to be able to care for her infant and then she often remains a house-wife because it is difficult to get out onto the job market when you have been away for years. This scenario was completely foreign to me when I first heard of it, because in Sweden both parents have the right to stay at home with the child for several months each and still be employed. Learning that this is not something to take for granted even in Europe, made me adjust my view and become a lot more understanding and accepting towards families that have more traditional gender roles.

I definitely believe that the key to personal development is to meet others and find out what they have to say. I remember being so surprised, maybe even a little shocked, when we discussed equality in my English literature class once in school and I realised how differently many of my friends viewed gender roles. Personally I would prefer it if there were no such thing as gender roles, because I think that men and women are both perfectly capable of doing the same things as long as they want to. I believe that it is all about choice and motivation!  But, with my growing understanding and awareness of different perspectives I have been able to see that what people want is not always the same and while some women want a career, others don’t. I still find it difficult to accept people who have the attitude that men are less capable of taking care of children, but I try not to get too worked up about it. If both I and the other person can put our close-mindedness aside it will be a lot easier for us to get along and if I have to be the person to set the example then I will try my best to do that.
I guess what I wanted to say by giving you this personal example is that everyone struggles with changing our opinions and/or accepting that others might have other opinions and I am absolutely not any different. What we can do is to try to be aware of these weak point we have, and maybe sometimes just stay away from topics which you know that you won’t be able to agree on!

/Hanna

Learning from cartoons: Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants

Less stuff is more happiness...

Open-mindedness: More about lifestyle

I first wanted the second text in our open-mindedness project to be about the many different ways of being open-minded, to show how many aspects of life this topic plays an important role in. However, the more I think about it, the longer the list grows. So, to give it time to reach near-full length, and still keep this project flowing, I built a little on what Hanna wrote in her introduction. This text will also be available in her blog: A Little Blog About Words.

Hanna already explained what we mean by being open-minded in the introductory post. An open-minded person is someone who is willing to consider and appreciate other lifestyles than his/her own. There is no requirement to let them influence your own life; but you ought to accept and respect the choices other people have made in their lives without passing hasty judgement.

Among our friends and acquaintances, Hanna and I have noticed that several people blindly consider their own lifestyle and/or world view to be the correct one. Some may be aware of this mindless conviction, others may just hold that belief subconsciously. We can find it rather irritating to have a conversation about important life questions if every idea we utter seems to shatter into dust against the solid wall that is the mind of our peer.

However, that is not the reason Hanna and I feel so strongly about this project. We feel sorry for them, really. We believe that their stubbornness will restrict their lives, fettering their minds to a single world, a single life. If you think that your lifestyle is perfect, you will be too complacent to see ways it could be improved. Just as life always can get worse, it can also always get better!

I personally believe that if you do not strive to become a better person, if you are too satisfied with yourself, you will stop changing. This is natural: why would you want to change if you are perfect? But, if you don’t try to improve, it means you have essentially stuck in the state you were in. I think that your life freezes the moment you stop wanting to change. You may end up in a self-destructive stalemate while the rest of the world moves on around you. A very sad thought, I find.

I believe this can be avoided by approaching people with different ways of living and being open to what their lives can teach you about yours. Imagine meeting a highly religious family that spends three hours every day praying and meditating. If you laugh at them because that is a ridiculous waste of time, then it is very possible live a rather stressful life with little spare time to enjoy living it; maybe you should actually consider starting to meditate yourself to calm down and appreciate your life more!

If you reflect upon your own lifestyle and world view through the eyes of other people, and listen with open ears, you may even find that you enjoy the realisation that your life might not be as good as you thought it to be! I know from my own experience that there are many ways of discovering that my habits, morals or ideologies are lacking, and most are pretty unpleasant. For example, when someone I care about stops talking to me for something I have said or done without thinking; or when I loose a good job because I did not appreciate it enough to make efforts to keep it; or when I have too much fun playing with my friends, loose control and accidentally hurt someone. When things like these happen, I get a sort of shock wake-up and the suffocating guilt is what triggers me to try to make amends and make sure I never repeat the mistake.

If I could learn to avoid such disasters simply by being open to what other people can tell of their own experiences, and by being open to understanding how different people feel about and react to different things, I would gladly embrace this pain-free way of learning.

So, to put what I want to say with this post in a simple sentence: be open-minded for your own good!

Open-mindeness: Post 1

My good friend Hanna and I have been discussing our feelings toward the importance of open-mindedness: how essential it is for tolerance and acceptance of the vast diversity of people that we live among. We are both active bloogers (honest, I do write quite a lot for my paleo blog at least), so we thought of making an open-mindeness project. Hanna took the initiative to introduce us to it.


One of the things which Sebastian and I spent a lot of time talking about during my visit in Bristol earlier this week was the importance of open-mindedness. I know that I have talked about this many times before, and some of you might think “Alright, we get it, stop nagging about it”, but if that’s how you feel I’m afraid that I’m going to have to disappoint you. For me, this is one of the most important issues there are, and I will probably continue to bring it up for as long as I live because unfortunately I doubt that there will be much change in people’s attitudes during my lifetime. Sebastian shares many of my opinions about this and we have therefore decided that we are going to collaborate and write a series of posts, in which we will discuss different aspects of open-mindedness.

To start this project, I would like to begin by trying to explain to you what I mean when I say open-mindedness. I don’t think it is necessary to be open to doing anything you are asked to be open-minded; there is no need to do things which you might not feel comfortable with doing. What you need to be able to do however, is in many ways more challenging and uncomfortable than all those other things put together: You need to be able to accept that although you might feel like you know how you want to live, there may be others who have chosen different life-styles and who are also perfectly happy with their lives. Every single person is shaped by so many different factors ranging from genes to cultural heritage, parental influences, school, friends etc. There is rarely a right or wrong way in which to live. To be open-minded is in my mind the ability to acknowledge this and to try to see beyond people’s choices and life-style and instead focus on their personalities. The truth is that most people are nice if you approach them with an open and accepting attitude.

To be open-minded does not mean that you need to love everyone you meet. You are bound to feel like you have very little in common with many people, and you are probably not going to like everyone’s personality and if that is the case you don’t have to be friends with them. However, you need to understand that this does not necessarily mean that you are living the right way and the other person has chosen the wrong life-style. I have previously said that to be open-minded you don’t have to change your world, but you need to be able to take a step out of it now and then and visit the “parallel worlds” in which the people around you live.

This guy has misunderstood the concept of open-mindedness…

Sebastian has a quite sarcastic and brutal sense of humor sometimes, and when I met some of his university friends I noticed that a couple of them seemed to be taking him too seriously. I really liked these people, and I thought it was a shame if they had misunderstood what kind of person Sebastian is. Afterwards we talked about this and Sebastian said that he knows that he should probably show more clearly when he is joking and when he is being serious. I agree about that and I think that would help others understand him better. However, at the same time Sebastian’s humor is a large part his identity and I would find it sad if he would have to change that completely just because others want him to be different. In situations like these I think open-mindedness can build bridges, prevent misunderstandings and help people connect in spite of differences. In this case, Sebastian needs to understand that with some people he might have to switch down his humour a bit and his friends need to accept that Sebastian has chosen to face life with a very light-hearted attitude because it is a life-style that suits him.

Of course, nobody is perfect. For instance I personally – ironically – often find it hard not to judge close-mindedness. This in turn makes me less open-minded myself! I try my best to at least be aware of this however, and that is a good start. I hope that by writing about it and giving you everyday examples, Sebastian and I will be able to provoke your thoughts a bit too and make you reflect upon what attitudes you might have and why you hold certain opinions!

This is all I had to say for now though,

Hanna

This was also published in Hanna's blog: A Little Blog About Words

Learning from the past: polar ice caps and climate chaos

Months ago, I wrote a second article for The Natural Planet school magazine, but it has not been published and I suspect the editor rejected it without informing me. Then, I decided to include it in this blog, seeing as I have not written anything for ages. 

Since I was working against an upper word limit, I had to skipp the explanations to many of the processes involved, but if anything is unclear, please ask and I'll be happy to try to explain more comprehensively. 

We are all aware that the ice sheets at the poles are melting as you are reading this. We hear about its consequences on a regular basis: that the sea levels will rise, flooding cities and crop fields, that the polar bears’ natural habitats will be destroyed, and so on. However, exactly what will change in the future is very hard to tell. Maybe, just maybe, we could find some clues in prehistory: if we study what happened when the ice caps first formed and in what ways the world changed in response, perhaps we could tell something about what we can expect when we cause the reverse. 

Before the Eocene epoch (56-34 million years ago), Earth was in a greenhouse phase: high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the absence of glaciers created a warm, humid world with productive oceans and dense tropical forests teeming with tiny mammals – no larger than modern rodents – since being small makes it easier to move through the thick vegetation.

What caused the Earth to cool down in mid-Eocene is not crystal clear, but it is likely a combination of several factors. A typical explanation is relating it to the Milankovitch cycles, a mathematical model for how the Earth’s orbit, change in tilt of the axis, and the way the axis wobbles, control surface temperatures.

In addition, the previous greenhouse conditions caused huge blooms of plants and algae; many of these were not decomposed, for some reason, so huge amounts of carbon were removed from the carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon dioxide decreased noticeably. (Today, by burning fossil fuels, we are reinserting massive amounts of carbon into the cycle, while deforestation and ocean pollution kills off the organisms that can sequester it from the air, which is why we see such an increase in carbon dioxide.)

Also, the movement of the continents caused changes in the ocean currents in such a way that the global heat transport to Antarctica was hindered: as South America and Tasmania detached from Antarctica, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current – a current of cold water that encircles the continent – effectively isolated the Antarctic region from warm water currents. With no heat influx, the continent quickly froze. Other tectonic rearrangements (e.g. the closure of the Tethys sea) may be accountable for the glaciers in the North Pole.

The polar glaciations bound huge amounts of water into ice, so, naturally, the sea levels regressed and the air was stripped of moisture. The next epoch, the Oligocene, thus saw the tropical jungles everywhere replaced by vast plains of grass, which is more resilient in dry, cold conditions. On these open spaces, the mammals grew much larger, and with tough, nutrient-poor grass as the main food, certain mammals with more sophisticated stomachs (especially the ruminants, such as deer, cows and goats) did extremely well and replaced their predecessors as the dominant herbivores.

This might not sound very dramatic, but this transition was actually a minor extinction event, where as much as 20% of all life at that time may have become extinct. The ones that did well did so because others could not cope with the drastic changes!

As the Eocene life perished, the plants and animals we are more familiar with today – most notably, grasses and cattle – emerged. They are adapted to such conditions, and, if we reverse the processes that brought them success, we could see our main food stocks crumble. Warmer, more moist conditions may favour increased yield in our crops, but it will favour interfering organisms such as weeds and insects more, forcing us to expend more resources – probably oil and nasty chemicals – on crop management. Even though we take special care of the crops and cattle so that they have little competition, the more unsuitable the global climate becomes, the harder it will be to maintain the food production, which is already dwindling.