Ask The Bigger Question

You may have noticed that life seems to be moving faster than it used to.  It's not really.  After all, we have the same 24 hours in every day that people always have.  It seems like it is moving faster because we are trying to fit more into those 24 hours and fueling them with caffeine.  Instead of Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, at 6 pm, we get news all day from multiple sources without regard to their credibility.  We want to get so much done that we are actually pursuing whether or not humans can live without sleep.

The relentless speed of input and activity means we rarely slow down long enough to reflect and ask the bigger questions, like how certain events fit into a larger context.  Our brains are processing so much data that we have no time to go through the steps of learning (via Architecture of Learning by Kevin Washburn).  We are constantly at the Experience level, but as our brains strive to reach Comprehension, a new piece of news comes our way.  It is hard for our brains to get to Elaboration and Application.  For that reason, we aren't fully integrating these experiences.  This cannot be good for the human brain, but we aren't even slowing down long enough to ask that question.

As a result of this constant bombardment without intellectual integration, we revert to our most basic of emotions, self-defense.  As an example, an announcement comes over the intercom at school, asking for men to come and help move some chairs.  The women in the building immediately react that this was sexist, even though, given a few moments of thought, we know that the people we work for don't view women as weak or less than men.  Because we don't take the time to reflect, we react out of surface level emotions.  We don't act; we react.  Because we live in 2017, we take our reaction to social media.  Because we live in a community, our reaction cause other people react as well; and we are soon in a Twitter war.  Other people jump on our side or the other side, and it gets out of hand quickly.  We say things we wouldn't if we just slowed down long enough to ask the bigger questions.

YIKES!  This can't be the way God meant for us to live our lives.

The good news is that we can make it better.  It won't be hard, but we will have to do it on purpose.  We have to slow down for a few seconds and ask ourselves a few questions.  This will keep us from reacting emotionally and, in some cases, keep us from reacting at all.

1.  What do I actually know about the situation?
Because of instant video footage, we think we know events.  The truth is, we may only know the 30 seconds shown in the video, which the person took after the inciting incident began.  We may not know what started the problem, but we are quick to judge that 30 seconds as though we were there.  Stop for another 30 seconds and ask yourself what you actually know before you respond.

2.  Do I know the character of the people involved?
My reaction to strangers should be different than my reaction to people I know well.  If I know that a person is not a sexist or a racist, I don't need to react to their tweet as though sexism or racism is clearly implied.  Take 30 seconds to say to yourself (out loud if you need to), "I know they didn't mean to come off that way."  Then, if you are still bothered, take a few minutes to go talk to them instead of about them.

3.  How will my reaction represent me?
This is big.  When we react out of self-defense or anger, we know everything that led up to that emotional moment.  Your Facebook friends do not.  They are not inside your mind, and to them, you may just look like an over-reacting, crazy person.  I assume you would not want to be viewed that way (unless it is the truth about you).  One over-reacting tweet may not ruin your reputation, but a series of them will.  Take 30 seconds to ask yourself, "Do I want this to be what people think of me?"

4.  Does my reaction fit with my worldview?
I am a Christian school teacher, so I spend a lot of my day thinking about worldview.  As we take in new information, it is filtered through our worldview.   That is why two people looking at the same data can interpret it as pro-creationism or pro-evolution.  Both people are reading the same thing different ways.  We think less about this, but our reactions should also be filtered through our worldview.  If I believe in the Biblical Jesus, my reaction should be Biblical.  That doesn't mean it will never be angry (Jesus did drive the money changers out of the Temple with a handmade whip), but I imagine it would be angry less often if I filtered it through a Christlike worldview.  I imagine the source of the anger would be less about me than most reactions we put online.  It's probably going to take more than 30 seconds to process this one, but it is worth the time.

We are all participating in a large scale, high stakes, sociological experiment.  That would be okay if it weren't rewiring our brains and making us reactive creatures.  You can step aside and change the parameters of the experiment.  Put the phone down for a minute.  React later.  There's no value in reacting first; there is only value in acting well.