Just Kristin

I really love to discuss/debate things with peo­ple, mainly because I learn things that way. I have no prob­lem being proven wrong. Where my prob­lem lies is this: I am in con­stant fear of los­ing the regard of my peers (or what lit­tle I may have). I don’t desire to be right so much as I want, when I am wrong, to be shown so grace­fully and with­out being made to feel like I just lost an Olympic event, or am not wor­thy of the “cor­rect” infor­ma­tion. Two quotes from Donna’s blog helped me pin­point this. One of them is from the works of Eck­hart Tolle, and explains one of my many “works in progress”:

“Observe the attach­ment to your views and opin­ions. When you become involved in an argu­ment or con­flict, watch how defen­sive you become, and feel the force of your own aggres­sion as you attack another person’s posi­tion. Feel the mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and make the other per­son wrong, then let go of the force inside you that is fight­ing for power.”

The other is a state­ment made by Syd­ney J. Har­ris:

“The most impor­tant thing in an argu­ment, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your oppo­nent, so that he can grace­fully swing over to your side with­out too much appar­ent loss of face.”

I don’t know if there are enough peo­ple skilled in the lat­ter for me to suc­ceed at the for­mer should I attempt to per­ma­nently enter acad­e­mia. Smug­ness and gloat­ing seem to per­me­ate most of what I know of graduate-level inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and I imme­di­ately become com­bat­ive or defeatist in the face of either. In my opin­ion, the very cooperation-dampening com­pet­i­tive­ness that seems to per­vade uni­ver­si­ties may spur indi­vid­u­als onward, but it does lit­tle for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of learn­ing, and often may squelch the hopes of those who do not reside in the aca­d­e­mic top .001% — peo­ple who are just as capa­ble of amaz­ing dis­cov­er­ies and equally if not more likely to share the infor­ma­tion they have found with oth­ers. Dr. A. said that there are schools that have a much more col­le­gial (rela­tion to the word “col­lege” should not be stretched so thin), less back-stabbing nature. I hope I can find one. Feel­ing defen­sive about not being “right” takes the fun out of learn­ing, and I want to learn all that I can so that I can give back all that I have. Most impor­tant, how­ever, should I decide to teach, will be mas­ter­ing the coun­sel of both men above in order that I never kill the spirit of my students.