When I was about fifteen I remember sitting on a beach near where we lived with my uncle who was reading me something he had written about the universe being anti-gravitational (don’t ask! He had a friend whose PhD was on ‘the eleven dimensions’) and I noted that he was frightened of the sea. He said it was very dark. I remember being surprised because I had always thought of the sea as a wondrous place one merely had to respect because it was dangerous.
It made me think about childhood experiences and how they shape our adult lives no matter how rational we are. I was scared for years of stormy weather and felt as if the ground was going to start moving until I learned from my mother that at ten months old I was at sea in a ship in a force ten gale. What she was doing on a ship when she was scared of water having been thrown into a pool by her father when she was five to teach her to swim, is a whole other story.
Our ways of thinking can be very structured but the foundations and assumption we base our thinking upon may often be nothing of the sort. Understanding those assumptions and questioning them may actually be the foundation for a less fractured society because nothing is so fixed we need to believe it all our lives.
Change, after all, is the great strength of nature.