Morning Reflection on Humility

Sitting reading this morning brought up a memory, or perhaps story is a better word, from my professional past.

Years ago I had applied for the Director’s position of Director of the Rural Studies program at the University of Guelph which was a bi-college program with five or six participating departments, fifty faculty members and at any given time had between 40 and 50 PhD students in it.

Part of the process was an interview from a collective of program faculty members (about 10 if I remember right) along with the Deans of the Ontario Agricultural College and what was then known then as College of Social Science.

During my interview a faculty member, who was a sociologist, asked me about my orientation to research. I suppose I had a reputation for doing qualitative research and was an avowed constructivist at that time while the faculty member who asked the question was a devoted positivist (it doesn’t matter if you know what these two words mean). We got into a long drawn out discussion, some might say debate and others might say argument. At one point the Dean of the Ontario Agricultural College who was chairing the interview intervened (he was an agronomist which by definition made him an implicit positivist; at that time most “hard” scientists would have been positivists even if they didn’t have the word for it which many didn’t, they just did science). ?The Dean intervened with what I consider an incredibly courageous intervention and said “I confess; I don’t have a clue what the two of you are talking about.” I then provided a brief description of each. What so impressed me was that here, in a public forum among faculty members, the Dean was willing to say he didn’t know what we were talking about, a true act of humility and courage I thought.

Why am I raising this issue? I think there is a fitting lesson to be learned here that has direct application to the times we are living through. I sit now and all around me I see and hear people who are certain about what they know, and that what they know is right, correct, and that others who view things differently are wrong, or manipulative, or lying, or any other descriptor you can think of. ?We need to start from a position of humility, acknowledging that there are things we do not know or perhaps understand. We need to learn to listen with an open mind and an open heart. If we are working to change the world we must surrender our certainty and gather our courage to admit we do not know, or we do not understand. While we all have access to truth, the truth any of us will hold will always be a partial truth at best. Perhaps perspective is a better way of looking at that partial truth. Simply stated, it is the nature of knowing.

We often think in terms of a win/lose scenario and that we need to be right so we might win. The reality is nobody wins, and everybody loses. The polarization we see in the world will not be resolved by simply convincing people to our side, convincing them that we are right and they are wrong. We must start by learning and to learn we need to learn to listen with an open mind and open heart; we need to exercise our humility and be humble. If we each do this, then we have the beginning place for respectful dialogue to begin and perhaps in time we will find a way of bridging our differences without resorting to physical or psychological violence. And in our humility we need to practice compassion and love, for it these capacities of humans that allow us to bridge our differences. We are all human, we all make mistakes and it is okay to say I was wrong, I didn’t understand or I made a mistake; this is an act of integrity and ?we can lose everything in this life but our integrity. That we must give away. I think for me this was the lesson I learned from Victor Frankl and his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”.

So this is a lesson I learned from the Dean of the Ontario Agricultural College and I am pretty sure he wasn’t even aware of what he was teaching me (and hopefully others who were seated around the table also), and it is why I am sharing it today.

I offer up my gratitude for this lesson and confess while I strive to enact it in my own life, I sometimes come up short. And that too is okay because I just try and pick myself up off the ground, dust myself off, acknowledge my shortcoming to both to myself and others, or where I went wrong and try again. ????