"The slow creeping death of our wonderment."

Something different for a Sunday morning.

"The slow creeping death of our wonderment."

Today, kinda random thoughts, but not entirely. It is about our kids and their possible progressive loss of wonderment from all of this technology around them. Which, I guess, is also germane to us adults as well. It is about climbing trees, sitting in silence, about letting ideas flow, about thought experiments, where many great things percolate from deep inside our minds. It is about taking chances, free thinking, stepping to the edge, and being alright with being wrong.

I wrote this back in 2017 on my personal website (shawnallen.net). Seemed valuable to share today after a soft attack on fresh ideas.

On the topic of "wonderment" . . . .

I have to admit, some of my greatest clinical insights as a student of human movement have come from long periods of wonderment. What intrigues me is when logically proposed wonderment is attacked. What I am referring to is the rare, yet often enough, occurrence on my clinical blog (thegaitguys.com) where a fresh idea or theory, a thought perhaps admittedly without a solid research base is attacked as unsubstantiated. Sometimes, I am left rolling my eyes when some purist in the comments section might write, "show me the research and data on this idea, otherwise it's crap". Questioning something unsubstantiated is just fine with me, but attacking is not. When did fresh ideas become crap, unworthy of consideration? Research does not necessarily set up our rules and guidelines to follow, it is perhaps more so there to foster our present knowledge on a topic, to afford us with information to base choices and thoughts upon. If someone thinks that the up to date research on a topic is the template, then they will be stuck in time. Growth will evade them. I feel sorry for those people, I feel sorry that their biases were not confirmed, that their belief system has felt questioned and rattled. I fear for these folks, they will never develop their own thoughts, never their own moments of Einsteinian genius. They will merely be followers of other's research and work, never free thinkers, and certainly never become those researchers who had just the same sort of questions and wonderment and yet sought out to prove or disprove their wonderment. The world has proven over and over again that the free thinkers, the wonderers, are often the leaders, the risk takers, the inventors, the forgers of human progress. And, they are handsomely rewarded for their time, their risks of looking like a fool. I feel blessed when I can steal a mere shot glass of insight from the deep wells of these types of people. All great ideas first started with a thought, a hypothesis, a wonderment. Just because no one has written a paper on a topic does not mean the ideas are invalid or not worthy of consideration. This is how we all grow, these wonderments, it is where all good research paper hypotheses begin, it is where we can leap to deeper insights and learn from each other. Without wonderment we remain stagnant, never to move farther ahead. The key is to not get trapped too firmly in our own biases, always looking for confirmation of said biases. This is a dark place where we all can fail to grow, and at times, I am guilty as charged, I admit it." -Shawn Allen

There is more in the link below. Click if you wish.

https://www.shawnallen.net/dailyblog/2017/9/24/the-slow-creeping-death-of-our-wonderment

Shawn Allen, the other gait guy
#gait, #wonderment, #thoughtexperiment, #learning, #gaitproblems, #gaitanalysis, #research, #personalgrowth