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We all have ideas and beliefs we hold firmly, things we take seriously and have confidence in. There is no harm or inherent evil in having firmly held convictions, even those formed on little to no concrete evidence. Sometimes we don’t have much more than our instincts and intuitions to work with. The harm does not come from the firmness, or even stubbornness, of our convictions but from the deliberate act of closing our mind to any new information which doesn’t perfectly match or support our existing perceptions.
At some point we have all encountered those who are stubborn in their ideas and opinions. Trying to coax the ‘set in their ways’ crowd to expand their scope of vision or embrace new practices can at times feel like an exhaustingly steep uphill struggle but stubbornness of conviction is not the same thing as a closed mind.
The stubbornly fixed mindset can be frustratingly resistant to new information but that resistance is primarily based in an attitude of minimalism and simplification, of staying focused solely on their chosen swatch in the tapestry and waving away anything else as having nothing to do with them. While somewhat anathema to our increasingly interconnected virtual world there can be something admirable about the…