My Small Insights

October 7, 2013

Today I’m not going to write a reflection like the ones I have been doing for the last couple of weeks. I had two moments today that really made my thinking shift a bit, they were kind of like small AHA –moments. And even though these small insights might not seem so relevant tomorrow, I really have enjoyed figuring them out today, so I have decided to write about them.

The first small insight was in our Newton time. In our debrief after having read Newton’s preface someone said how he/she had enjoyed tackling the text today. And this got me thinking. I have never really liked this phrase ‘tackling the text’, it just don’t seem right. Hearing that phrase just makes me want to do one of those weird faces one makes when one doesn’t like something. I think that what made me feel this way about the phrase was that it reminded me of American football, and I just imagined some big defense attacking someone on the offense. I found it too violent of a phrase to be used here, especially when used in reading a text.

But after thinking this through a while I realized that it is the correct phrase, especially when it is a complicated reading. It’s like if we want to give the text our all and really get to the bottom of it. Understand exactly and everything that the author wants to tell us. It’s like if I don’t even want to leave a little part of the text standing, or misunderstood, I want to bring it all done. And by this I mean that I want to understand it completely. So from now on, I think that I will start using this phrase more often.

My second small insight was, for a moment, a frustrating one. We were in our Way of Discovery dialogue and we had to describe Polanyi’s pictures. I tried explaining one of them and I was almost sure that I had it right, I thought I was explaining it correctly, but Bert just said ‘blah, blah, blah’, and it made me feel like if what I was saying was just nonsense. But I knew that there was some truth in what I was saying, so his reaction really ticked me off. I even checked my book later, and I had said the correct things, maybe my wording was a bit off, but at least I tried to give the right idea. Okay, maybe the reason for all of this frustration is that I get a little confused while talking. And this isn’t new; it’s something I have been struggling with since the first semester. I can’t seem to find the correct words to express my ideas. Well, the point is that I was so frustrated in the dialogue that I didn’t even want to talk anymore, I didn’t want to participate. I was just being sour.

It wasn’t long after that I realized that it was just dumb for me not to want to talk. I might’ve made a mistake or not given my point clearly enough, but it was no matter. As Andrew had told me before, it’s better to mess up a hundred times quickly. I messed up, so what? At least I’m one step closer to improving and not making the same mistake again. Next time I should just try to make my point clearer and try not to take things so personally, I mean at the end who doesn’t make mistakes?

So my conclusion from this experience is:

Talk again, mess up again, it makes no difference, it’s just step closer to improvement.