On, In, and Around Mondays: Guessed
On Friday I asked people to take a guess. I absolutely *loved* the ideas that were generated. And I promise it is all going somewhere (simple revelation coming soon. :)
During the guessing game, I spent some time in peripheral conversations with people. "Did you look at both sites before making your guess?" I asked them.
Some said yes, some no.
It's not like there were any instructions that said it was absolutely necessary to take mulitiple perspectives into account. And the links between sites were very small. They just said, Here or "today's other clue." So it's perfectly okay that some people made their guesses from a single perspective.
As it turns out, this particular result of our guessing game provides a very nice illustration for this week's High Calling introduction to Mindfulness, by Ellen Langer.
Acting from a single perspective is one of the reasons Langer says we sometimes miss making the meaning we need to make.
Of course, in our guessing game, I stacked the deck a little, giving out a narrow perspective to begin with and only increasing it over time. (Also, it's no easy riddle, so everyone who participated should be pleased with their guesses (I was completely tickled! :)
In the end, somebody who took in multiple perspectives did finally, guess what... guess.
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Coming soon: a revelation of the simple reason we played our guessing game. In the meantime, care to join us for a bookclub discussion of Mindfulness, by Ellen Langer?
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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place. Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below.
If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)
This post is also shared with Laura Boggess, for...
Labels: book clubs, Ellen J. Langer, guess, Mindfulness, thehighcalling.org
posted by L.L. Barkat at 10:11 PM
5 Comments:
Great way to make the introduction to the book.
The flip side is that being so mindful to include many perspectives or opinions could result in confusion or inability to make any decision, depending on the task at hand. Key is knowing how to draw or tease out meaningful meaning from complexity, even at its most basic. The person who can do that and who, in this particular instance, came into the guessing game after others might draw on those other answers to fashion one of his own. Or not.
It would be interesting to know how many respondents took the guessing game seriously and how many were just having fun, not really caring whether the guessing was leading to the answer. Generally, observing how people participate in gaming can yield some wonderful insights into assumptions, what people "see" or not, patterns of thinking, decisionmaking, etc.
Well, I think that one looks more like an insect wing than the other one did. And I looked from all angles. So fun, what you are doing here! Thinking about missing pieces today.
I guessed, but I don't think I did very well. ha. I didn't assume they were pictures of the same object.
I'm reading along in
Mindfulness" as well. It's making me more aware already.
I read and DID your "God in the Yard" this spring and was so moved by the experience. I posted about it quite a bit. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and for inspiring my own.
It looks like the gas pump at the local filling station - and the not-wuite-closed circle at Green Inventions looks like part of the filling station logo.
Of course, those were rather mindless guesses -- my car needs gas right now.
All I knew was something was missing. I thought it might be a piece of my mind. Very clever, you are.
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