Part of the journey I am on with this site involves letting go of a lot of the beliefs that I have held on to for a long time.
One of those beliefs is that I know what is best for me. I wrote a post on a website called Medium about this idea. I hope you read it here:
Today I came across two thoughts that fit in with this idea.
- We don’t know what we don’t know. (Saw this on a blog about time management from someone who followed me on Twitter)
- Empty your cup. (I heard this at my son’s XMA class and it reminded me of the Zen story below)
We don’t know what we don’t know No matter what your politics are, I think this is a brilliant statement of a simple idea:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
– Donald Rumsfeld
Man, this one hits me hard. It goes along with the Rules of the Road and why I think the idea of being as Antifragile as possible is a great thing.
Empty your cup is from a Zen story about a professor who visited a Zen master and wanted to learn about his ways and when the Zen master pours him some tea, he lets the cup run over and the tea spills all over the table and down onto the floor until the professor has to say out loud that the cup is full and he can stop pouring. (And if you don’t drink tea you can imagine say, rice like the pic above – I didn’t have any shots of tea cups!)
The Zen master then tells the professor that his mind is like the cup. It is already full of ideas and opinions and nothing more will go in. He must empty the cup to allow the Zen teachings a place.
I feel like that all the time right now. I feel like I need to empty my cup daily in order to make room. I need to be able to clear my head and be more flexible in the way I think about things. That way, the things I don’t know that I don’t know can find a place to enter.
With gratitude,
Kirk
If there is ever anything I can do to help you out please let me know….
