The Railroad Tracks
For some odd reason, we are all accustomed (or maybe acculturated) to accept obedience as a blanket value. That bleeds over into our behavior: Behave Yourself! Fine, when it comes to not playing on the railroad tracks. But that blanket can cover too much, even cover our thinking. If we are told often enough "Stop that!" and taught that error is punishable, we see railroad tracks everywhere.
Hans Selye, the guru of stress study, placed rats in an enclosure with no shelter. He gave them food, water, but no place to hide. They died. It wasn't until dissection that he discovered what he named the Stress Triad, basically giant adrenal gland, ulcers, and a disappearing thalmus. That's as technical as I'm going to get. The rats basically freaked out to death. Unable to deal with being out of order - exposed - they were victims of ambiguity. We can learn more about this from kids. How's that for an ambiguous (therefore useful) connection?
Children, especially the little ones, are the most amazing (and enviable) engines of ambiguity. They're smarter than we are. They, of course, want stability, but they're drawn to ambiguity: play. Play is the best critical thinking exercise. Though games have rules, they rely for their interest and excitement on the unknown, the Ambiguous. Out of Order means several things: Operating outside of the accepted rules. Always questioning our frames of thinking, our assumptions. And, that in the 21st century, we may be out of order: Change is so rapid and constant that we need to be agile, flexible, fearless and vulnerable. New ideas are not Railroad Tracks. We can, we must play there.
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