Understanding

You may have noticed (or not noticed - given your life doesn't revolve around my blog posts) that I've not written for a couple of weeks. You see (hedging) - I've been waiting for a better understanding of understanding - so that I can profess to understand anything about understanding at all.

What is understanding? Here is what the Oxford dictionary online says - word-for-word:

noun

[mass noun]

• 1the ability to understand something; comprehension: foreign visitors with little understanding of English
• the power of abstract thought; intellect: a child of sufficient intelligence and understanding
• an individual’s perception or judgement of a situation: my understanding was that he would find a new supplier

• 2sympathetic awareness or tolerance: he wrote with understanding and affection of the people of Dent

• 3 [count noun] an informal or unspoken agreement or arrangement: he and I have an understanding he had only been allowed to come on the understanding that he would be on his best behaviour

adjective

• 1sympathetically aware of other people’s feelings; tolerant and forgiving: a kind and understanding man people expect their doctor to be understanding

• 2 archaic having insight or good judgement. 

Brilliant! This fits my argument perfectly. My argument, to continue from my last post, is that we cannot know anything - yet I think we can understand things. If we're dealing with people - I suggest we can't have the nouns without the adjectives. If we're to be holistic (bloody hippie) we probably need to have the power of abstract thought, insight and good judgement, sympathetic awareness and tolerance, and we need to be them.

This is my job as a teacher I think. I can't just teach people what things are. I want them to understand what things are. Or at least understand why we think things are what they are - and what everyone understands them to be - and why. This doesn't happen when people are part-time understanders. (Yes - I invented a word) I want to teach people how to be understanding. Actually, I have to change the wording around that - because I can't teach anyone how to be anything. People learn things themselves - and all we can do is plant the seeds, or show them how to plant the seeds themselves. This is what understanding is - it's personal, and it's universal - all at once.

Teaching, believe it or not, is up with the play on this philosophy now. It recognises that everything is subjective, and that our individual realities are constructed by our experiences. The key, and I'm still figuring this out, so bear with me, is to understand this in a universal context. There is a very long rabbit hole to go down with this - so watch this space!

Truth

Since my last post I've been thinking about the existence of truth.

Is there an objective truth? Most of us think so, I wager. Many spend their lives trying to find it. Are you one of those people? The people who are on a constant quest for knowledge, truth, and understanding? The question I pose to you now is why? Why are you spending your life looking for this truth to know and understand?

I'll tell you why I'm not.

Life on this planet, as I currently understand it, is finite. Humans have created our fortunes and now we are creating our end. Plain and simple - we are killing ourselves with our lifestyles of fat, sugar, and fossil fuels. The planet doesn't need saving - we do. Papatuanuku will right herself again when we're gone. I think this because I believe if earthworms disappeared overnight - everything would stop growing and the planet would get very sick indeed..... if humans disappeared overnight - the planet would flourish. This is my truth. It might not be the ultimate truth, or it might be, I don't know. I'm not going to spend decades trying to find out. Instead I'm going to act on what I think is happening - because I don't think I have the luxury of illusory time.

I'm not going to do this by recycling, using my compost bin, or buying biocups and plates etc. I do these things because they're better than the alternatives - but I'm under no illusion that the newspaper recycling bins in the Air NZ terminal will mitigate the millennially-captured-sun-energy I just used on the plane. Some scientists are saying we're at the peak of no return re climate change anyway. I'm going to do this by fine-tuning my social justice scruples and looking after my fellow human.

Now, how does this relate back to the topic of truth? I don't know if anything is true. I don't know if we can save our people from extinction. I don't know if we're even on the verge of it. I do know (oh dear - someone's gonna hang me for claiming to know something) that cause and effect seems to exist - and is quite useful. Cause: you help your fellow human in a positive, non-environmentally degrading way - Effect: your fellow human has an awesome time and passes it on. This may be karma, this may be good faith, this may be simple opportunistic point-scoring - but it's not sitting around wondering what the truth is before we act.

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