The Sanford Berenberg Experience: Message of the Day

Good Morning,

Okay, the title is a bit deep for my messages, but bear with me on this one. A few weeks ago, I was chatting with one of my friends and the subject of people needing to understand what they don’t understand came up. Through the course of the discussion, we talked about the impact of that not knowing and the attempts to fill that missing knowledge and how that has caused more problems and cost more pain than almost anything else that people do.

Let me back up.

When we hear a bump in the night, the first thing we think of is ‘what was that?’ Either that or ‘Honey can you find out what that is, I’m going back to sleep’.

We hear or see something that we do not understand, that we do not know what it is, and our mind starts to race. We try to fill in the blanks. What could that sound have been, what could that thing I saw in the sky have been, etc.

Instead of accepting that we may just not know what that sound is, and move on, we try to fill in the blanks. I have known folks who almost become petrified as they try to find out what something must have been. It is even funny to hear some of the answers they spout out in their rapid trek to finding an answer.

Then, it gets bad.

When filling in the blanks, we often act on what we have just filled into the blank. If we end up reasoning that the bump in the night was someone breaking into our house, then we respond by grabbing a bat, or other defensive weapon and go searching for the intruder, that is whatever we find is an ‘intruder’, not a cat, a dog, a daughter, or pipes expanding and contracting. If we see something odd flying in the sky is something from another world, we may start telling folks we saw a UFO. We may even take pictures and videos of it. I once saw a triangular craft that flew very slowly over Stewart Airport in upstate New York. It was seemingly hovering while I drove nearly 10 miles along State Route 17K. Turned out it was the B2 Bomber flying over the base, which was in the news the next day, with photos.

In ancient times, when humans did not understand the world around them, they created pantheons of gods to describe the world around them.

It’s human nature. We have not changed that much, except that we have cooler gadgets now.

One would think that with all the technological advances we have made over the decades that these unknowns would become less, and our fears would be assuaged more easily. Funny thought.

The more we know, the more we find out that we don’t know. The more we understand, the more we find that we don’t understand.

Folks, we have ended up opening up more than just one Pandora’s Box of unknowns. Add to that, our human nature has not changed. We still encounter the unknown and still try to come up with explanations for it.

Sometimes the unknown needs to be figured out, like that sound in the night. Is it a leaking pipe or someone trying to get into our homes.

Many things, though, are okay not to understand. We can try to allow ourselves to say, ‘well, I am not sure what that was, and I am okay with that’.

Friendships have been destroyed because something went missing and the only way to reason it out was one of your friends must have taken it. Ignore the fact that friend never lied to you, never did anything wrong, but it must have been so. So the friendship is broken. Then you find the missing item in your car. Oops. Funny, but still, no more friendship, damage has been done.

Whole cultures and subcultures have been developed based on what people have pieced together to answer their unknown questions.

We have seen it, and we have lived it. We may even be the culprits who constantly grapple with the unknown and instead of either researching an answer, or just living with the unknown, we guess and folks just go along with us, no matter how feeble our guesses are.

A lot of the messes our world is in today are because of humanity needing to know and coming up with ‘plausible’ answers, which end up being totally wrong, but are not as nearly as devastating as the impact of acting on those ‘plausible’ but at that time accepted answers.

Maybe we should take a step back and accept that there will be things that we will just not understand.

And that is okay.

Honest.

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net
http://www.berenberg.net

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/
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