Paradigm Shifts Are Rarely Easy

When I was growing up and a pastor used sports metaphors all the time, I would often roll my eyes when he got started. That’s how I feel on your behalf anytime I start a conversation with “parenting has taught me.” I guess what I want you to know is these lessons are available in many walks of life, these lessons just seem to slap me upside the face when there’s a little human on the other side of the lesson.

Sometimes these lessons coming from the mouths of babes are straight from their classrooms. And, while relational and psychological lessons can be a challenge, there’s nothing like my educational blocks being proverbially kicked out of my mental foundation.

For example, the classification of different things like Pluto! Pluto was a planet when I was growing up; then in 2006 Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet (it’s smaller than our moon). When the rules of sports games change, my brain also struggles to keep up. For example volleyball now has a libero, and in basketball only six people line up on the sides of the lane during a free throw.

Not all of the lessons are a simple shift is guidelines or rules. Some of the lessons I’m learning are because we were simply wrong when I was being taught growing up. This is the case with dinosaurs. I was taught that dinosaurs went extinct. Were you taught that dinosaurs went extinct too?!? Well, the more paleontologists study the fossils of dinosaurs that lives thousands of years ago, the more they’re learning that dinosaurs didn’t go extinct. Dinosaurs evolved, and 10,000 different species of them grace our skies, our trees, and our Thanksgiving dinner tables. * mind blown *

Each of these lessons I’ve learned as an adult has been uncomfortable. It’s as though my childhood education built me a foundation brick by brick, and when the facts of my childhood education are deemed inaccurate or incorrect someone has kicked a brick out of my foundation. It’s way easier to argue that the old understanding was better, more logical, made for better athletic competition, or any number of other arguments than to wrestle with the paradigm shift I’m being invited into.

Taking in new information that contradicts your previous understanding with the intentionality of opening yourself to a new understanding is significantly more uncomfortable than just acquiring new information to add bricks to the top of your educational foundation. And yet, when I face my discomfort and do the work to wrap my head around the new information and come to my own new understanding, it makes me both a better parent to those teaching me and makes the next paradigm shift slightly easier.

What is something you’ve needed to learn differently that’s shifted your understanding? Did someone walk the journey with you? What could’ve made it easier? What made it difficult?

May you know that paradigm shifts are rarely easy but they never have to be taken alone. Give me a call. Maybe we can learn something new together.

Peace,
Rev Elizabeth