Learning and growth have been on my mind a lot lately.
Bear with me, this is going to be a long one.
So first, there was the two week period I spent learning my way around a particular technical problem at work.
Second, while I'm generally left-leaning, I've been making efforts lately to understand the emotional position and feelings of more right-leaning conservative friends and relatives of mine.
I'll admit that I see mostly right-leaning folks post things to social media that sometimes make me roll my eyes, or that make my blood boil a bit.
A whole bunch of stuff happened yesterday that came together in one big synthesis for me around both these things, about ten minutes ago.
At work yesterday I spent the better part of the day observing two co-workers argue with each other. Co-worker A is struggling to understand and do technical things he doesn't really know. He's constantly asking co-worker B (and everyone else there too) for help, and cops an attitude about getting that help, and being asked to do things which aren't his job, and generally being a distracting, entitled, whiny pain-in-the-ass.
It looked for a little while like Co-worker B was really getting bent out of shape about it, and going to kick Co-worker A right in his A. Stressful!
Later in the day I got to talk to my friend Magnus as I drove home from the gym. Magnus is amazing. He's in a constant state of learning. In the 15 plus years I have known him he's evolved interests in electroluminescent wire, model race cars, poi spinning, biking, and geodesic domes, just to name a few things. Like me, he's interested in paramotoring, and we waxed enthusiastically together over the phone about a plan for us to eventually do that together over and around the Burning Man festival, eventually.
Then I got into a lovely conversation with another dear friend, who I have known since college, my friend Scott. Like me, Scott's often a big old lefty. Like me, he's also very kinky. Like me, he's also a super-talky-analytical-likes-to-sound-things-out-together sort of guy.
So we did.
We got into an interesting discussion last night about how people (ourselves included) often confuse opinion and fact.
Avogadro's law is a good example of a fact. (Avogadro's law states that, "equal volumes of all gases, at the same temperature and pressure, have the same number of molecules".)
You can think that's great. You can think it sucks rocks. Doesn't matter. It's still true. That's a fact.
This morning as I was laying in bed, both these conversations and yesrerday's experiences were swirling through my head as I was surfing social media.
I saw some more of that eye-rolling content, got annoyed, and then I saw two things that brought that train to a staggering halt.
First there was this photo:
