“An open mind is a mind that’s not all there!” was a street slogan from some dim and distant past. A sentence with that much logic and ambiguity made me curious. What am I supposed to understand by openness? And where does the faintly dismissive undertone of that word come from?
Children have no concept of “too curious.” The new arrivals on planet Earth are, for the most part, researchers in full swing. They want to fill their still-small brains with experience and knowledge. They are simply curious little creatures with relatively little sense of where the dangers are. I remember well the time I tried to investigate the electrical outlet with knitting needles, searching for the point of the thing. Ergo: open-hearted curiosity can be painful.
Children usually don’t know they are extreme. These little extremists roam freely in the territory of creativity. No child asks whether it should experiment as an artist or simply as a child with crayons and felt-tip markers on walls. Children just do it, because it brings joy and provides variety.
Now, what does the reversal — or the retreat — from open creativity look like? Or, put differently: what is it like to grow up as a child when openness in the family is rather frowned upon? Then the child learns to be quiet. Orderly. Unremarkable. And somewhere along the way, the creative streak, the thirst for knowledge, and the joy of experimenting gets left behind.
As a very small child I was — like most of my contemporaries — not all there. I was a nappy child. But I didn’t find the situation embarrassing or bad. On the contrary. It was an excellent service, being freed from the nasty-wet-and-cold cloths after a soaking, bathed and powdered and then handed a fresh nappy to fill. What room service a baby receives!
Still, after a time the routine grew somewhat tedious, and I became a little irritable when the procedure was carried out. I wanted to see changes. And they came soon enough, in the form of a pot that I was expected to fill myself, if you please. Sit still, wait and wait and wait until the little legs fall asleep. But when the pot visit was successful, I received a standing ovation.
Yes, the pot was open at the top.
The teenage years are a wonderful and, above all, perfectly fair time. As an adolescent I managed to annoy everyone around me. Myself included. Everything that had come before had landed in question mode.
Why this? Why that? Why me?
Of course, questions were answered for me — by parents, teachers, but above all by classmates. What is sex? If so, why and how? What is an alcoholic, and why? Are we capitalists, and what is that?
The questions multiplied and revolutionised one’s awareness. At some point, and fairly quickly, my questions focused on the world of adults. I no longer saw them as advisors and knowers-of-all, but rather as the eternal know-it-alls and hobby-dominators.
Adolescence expressed itself above all in an openness to argument, discussion, resistance, and spiky rhetoric.
But then adult life landed and made my existence rather more curious. The required compliance in the working world struck me as suspect. It still does. Because whoever complies changes nothing. It might just be that some thought in the open mind of an adult carries an excellent — or at least worth-considering — idea. During my apprenticeship I realised fairly quickly that I was entirely unsuited to the status of employee. Too many rules. “That’s how we’ve always done it.” And above all, the creeping boredom of the daily work spoiled any notion of employee status as a worthy goal.
Entrepreneurship, on my own terms.
That was my credo. Because I wanted to stretch my mind as far as it would go. Was my mind open enough to build something of my own? It replied, breezily: “Time to experiment, my friend!”
I like my open mind, which chatters away without a filter.
The best eye-opener for open ways of living was, without question, the hippie era of the late sixties and the precocious seventies. It wasn’t only the beat and rock music you could barely hear on the radio. It was the unfamiliar and the unapologetic — the long hair, the denim uniform, the easy-going attitude towards the traditional and conservative — that drew me in.
Sixty years on? The draw is still there. The mistrust of the preserved likewise. And the appeal of communities strikes me as even more attractive.
And when was the time riper than now to engage with the unconventional, with an open mind and open will? The challenges shout at us daily: “Do something. Try something.”
I see, hear, and read every day about the openness-affected of this world. They come around the corner with new concepts, promising experiments, and above all immediately actionable ideas, to bring this world back into balance.
Still.
Open Ways of life of this world: unite!
