Those who can’t hear the music

Isn’t it funny that, especially whilst in our youth, but still for many of us in adulthood, we believe to know it all and think others ways of acting or behaving appears strange or weird to us?

Because we don’t understand their reasons or struggle with deciphering their language or reasoning as oftentimes we just don’t have the capacity to understand.

Earlier, In the weights gym I was weight training and going through my routine, when I spotted a lifter training hard across from me.

In between sets though, they were dancing away, ignorant or at least oblivious to the other members in the gym and most notably dancing to a different beat of music than of that which was blasting loudly through the facility that all the other members could hear.

Between each set you could see the joy and abandon on their face as they moved and grooved to seemingly a different beat than what all the rest of us could hear.

Oblivious to onlookers thoughts and opinions.

And I thought it was brilliant.

Instantly, it brought a smile to my face.

Not just because of the joy and happiness they showed from moving and dancing, but from the fact that they could care less about the opinion of others.

They obviously had their own music playing through their headphones, that provided them with more information than what we, the uninitiated onlookers of the gym, were privy to.

Then, it got me thinking about a quote often  attributed to German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

And how so often, we judge, erroneously oftentimes, those who’s opinions differ from ours all because we can’t hear the music that they hear.

We hear of it all the time, the ignorance and arrogance of the uneducated casting doubt on those with the knowledge, the new outlook.

We see this In the sad story of the German physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.

He posited a theory that matter and all complex things were subject to entropy and probability, which at the time was ridiculed and met with great resistance by his peers but later caused a Massive shift in the world of physics.

Unfortunately, Boltzmann committed suicide during a bout of depression as his work was being belittled and scrutinised by his peers.

Had he been able to see it through, he would’ve seen how revered his work became. How all that he saw would have come to fruition. Had he been able to understand he was a forward thinker.

And we see this a lot.

People who see things in the future, (not psychics) but those With a futurist vision, who see ten or fifteen years in to the future of a subject, topic or thought, often times get thought of as weird or strange or different, until their theories eventually make sense to everyone else too.

Then, in hindsight, their visions, thoughts and discoveries are thought of as exemplary and those creators, visionaries.

So how about we begin to aim to embrace and adopt this new perspective of removing ourselves from instantaneous reaction, defensively, and instead embrace a growth mindset  and be open to different perspectives and thoughts from multiple sources.