Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door for the first time the other day.
They started on their “Kingdom of Heaven” stuff and I was like, “ok, you can go.” They left.
I thought about it for a long time after that– how can people wake you up, come into your house and annoy the hell out of you and everyone else they come across? How can they do it to one person after another, day in and day out? How emotionally stunted do these people have to be to not understand the impact they have?
Look, only the naive and the obscenely polite will let you into their house and let you berate them in this way. They should know this better than anyone– they do it all day long.
What this and a number of other practices suggest is that there are a significant portion of the population for which common sense and logic are not basic faculties of everyday use. It’s shocking.
What’s even more shocking is that you are one of them.
Not with everything, of course. You’re generally a pretty smart individual. But examine your behaviour for a second– I bet you there are holes in your logic, in your habits, that make absolutely no sense. There definitely are in mine.
The truth is, everyone is like this. We are largely smart, capable people that make a lot of sense. But then you’ll meet a PhD candidate who believes in astrology and it throws everything out of whack. You realize that everyone has them, and they’ve had them because they’ve given up on that part of the map.
“Here there be dragons” is a common phrase you see in old fantasy books that had maps on the front pages. They showed the main kingdoms and cities, the roads, the oceans… and then, a hinterland– a dangerous territory labelled in this way, on the edge of civilization, that had been given up on.
Your inner maps have these places too. Do you know where?
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