I.23 — Against Believing

Believing is a grip on an answer, closed around it the way a hand closes on something it does not intend to open again. It feels like certainty, and certainty feels like safety. But a hand that has closed has also stopped feeling what it holds.

This is the quiet cost of a tightly held view: it ends the looking. Why keep examining a matter already settled? The opinion stands in for the subject from then on, and the actual thing, the person, the argument, the situation, stops being looked at at all, replaced by a fixed picture made once and never revisited.

There is a felt difference between knowing something because it was looked at, freshly, again and again, and agreeing with something because it was decided once and defended ever since. Knowing-by-looking stays a little unsettled, ready to update. Agreeing-by-holding goes still and stays still, mistaking its own stillness for the truth of the matter.

Find one opinion held tight today, about a stranger, a habit, yourself. Notice, honestly, whether looking at its actual subject still happens, or whether the opinion has been doing all the looking's work by itself for a while now, unchecked.