How Do We Change the World?

One of my favorite quotes is by the late Charlie "Tremendous" Jones. "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read."

We all know we ought to surround ourselves with people that make us better than we already are. Often, it is easier said than done. In my case, I find it easier to associate with people at least 5-10 years my senior. This was quite true as I grew up as well.

My mother homeschooled us and indeed it is something I am profoundly grateful for. It is not that I was sheltered or had awkward social skills. I found the items my peers were dealing with slightly amusing but mostly useless. I much preferred speaking with their parents, and hearing what it was like to get on in the world. The greatest benefit I gleaned from this was avoiding other people's mistakes.

I heard a wise man say once, "learning from your own mistakes is knowledge, learning from other people's mistakes is wisdom."

I believe we can learn from the mistakes of history as well. Of course this is only in proportion to the books outside of our present day milieu that we read.

Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook — even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a great mass of common assumptions." -CS Lewis

Expecting to change present day problems with present day thinking will yield predictable results. As Einstein said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

It is not the problem that gets in the way, it is our reliance on what we currently allow in our cosmos. Our subconscious can only work with what we feed it. Desiring to live in a better world, and leave a better one to our children, begins with learning from those who have gone before us. It takes a bit of humility.

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