It just happened to me these days that I was entangled in a weird mess of communication and misunderstanding. Everything around me started boiling, it was amazing how a molehill became a mountain. It is interesting that exactly today I discovered this talk of Temple Grandin on TED, and it helped me to regain some peace in my mind, because I had started doubting myself in a way that was not constructive anymore.
As I see it, one of the major handicaps in communication is that we are jumping to conclusions, that we are concerned about the similarities among us by neglecting, ignoring or even discriminating the differences. We prefer the alliances and condemn the other. I think this is so very wrong and it is so very prejudicial to our interactions with all kind of living beings. Temple Grandin gives a thrilling insight into her autistic mind. We don’t have madness, and we don’t have psychiatric cases in the world, we have a continuum of differently wired minds with different ways of thinking and behavior respectively emerging from these different structures. There are all transitions between visual to pattern to verbal thinking/working minds. Difference thus is not a domain of philosophy and social science only but “hard-wired” natural science.
Since I am working with biestmilch I feel it under my skin everyday what it means to walk on another path because of a mind that ticks the way it does, a mind that forces me to work the way I work … and I am told every other day how I could do better, but I can’t … and I learned to smile regardless 😉
