Friday, September 30, 2011

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance part 5

I feel like there are  more things than you can count that you have to form an opinion about.  Political issues, religious issues, philosophical issues, and many more.  I feel overwhelmed sometimes because I don't know where I stand on many of these things.  
Because of this, I used to think about each thing individually. For each issue, I would figure out what I thought and move on to the next one.  What I knew, but didn't realize, is that these issues all interconnect.  If I come across new ideas and they change my view point on one thing, then other things might change as well.  
This makes me want to spend hours just sitting and thinking about what I believe and how that affects my position on various subjects.  
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance this changing of ideas and positions has been an ongoing theme throughout the book.  The narrator starts with one view and then narrows it down, discovers new aspects or ways of thinking about it, changes views because of this new information, and discovers new aspects again.  He is not afraid to find a new viewpoint that might be better.  

1 comment:

  1. That's why world view studies are so interesting. Sometimes when a person doesn't think about their world view, it still affects what they think about everything else. And sometimes, what they think is their world view really isn't when it is held against what they think about everything else.

    It's all the connections between everything that I find so interesting.

    ReplyDelete