Thomas is a senior at Jacksonville High School. His belief concerns the importance of being flexible with new ideas.
I believe in the importance of keeping an open mind. It may sound cliché; indeed, it is. Nevertheless, I am only seventeen; I have luckily had an existence without misfortune and hardship, so I don’t have very many life lessons to choose from. However, if there is one thing I have learned from my adolescent years, it is that the world is infinitely more complex than I had assumed. I believe that every way of viewing it is bound to have flaws, thus necessitating an open mind in order to be able to let go of flawed ideas and to accept new ones.
As a teenager in the 21st century, I have at my fingertips access to a quantity of information that is incomprehensibly vast and changing constantly. Recently, I learned that scientists have cooled gas molecules to temperatures below absolute zero, overturning what I believed had been an absolute fact: that zero was the lowest temperature attainable. We live in a time where facts can change quickly, and a flexible and open mind is needed to keep up with the rate of change.
The one experience that really brought home the importance of open mindedness was my friendship with Alex. Alex and I became friends in third grade, partly because we were very similar. We both loved chess and Legos and knights, among other things, and we both had coinciding ideas about girls (gross) and about school (boring). However, Alex came from a very conservative Catholic background (his family would drive all the way to St. Louis to hear Mass in Latin), while I came from a much more liberal background. At first, when we discovered our differing views, we would often get into long pointless arguments about religion and politics. As we matured, however, we both began to shift from arguing to discussing. Eventually we both learned to accept the other’s views, even though we did not really change our own. Open-mindedness was the key to preserving our friendship, and from it we both matured and grew.
If I have learned one thing about truth, it is that it is not black and white, nor is it shades of grey. It is a beautiful and complex fractal, where at its edges every color twists together with an interminable level of complexity. It is not something that we can learn once and be done with, but something which we must actively use our mental faculties to pursue. I believe that we must listen to each other, that we must read and explore, and that by opening our minds to new things we can ultimately learn and grow in constant exploration of the truth.