reminds me of the concept of incomplete intuitions--we might intuit that we are supposed to do something but err in the conclusion of why, but if we keep an open mind, we might still end up at the right place
Your piece also reminds me of Alan Arkin's book, Out of My Mind, that I read all 100 pages of recently in one sitting and have been mentioning various parts of in many comments, which serve as an outline of sorts for the essay that is percolating in my various levels of consciousness.
In the first chapter, he talks about several transitions from belief set to belief set over the course of his life and how with respect to each one he would have vigorously or comfortably tried to change the whole rest of the world to his way of thinking. He writes, "After a few years of this, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to stop believing in so many things. I looked back and realized that for the first half of my life I'd been ready to change the world three times with three sets of beliefs, each one of which I'd outgrown and discarded, so it seemed a better idea to just shut up. I started to slowly let go of my needs for the rest of the world and began living more and more in my feelings and my intuitions and concentrating on the enormous faults within myself that needed addressing and correcting. As I did so, and it was a slow and painful process, I could see that whatever work I did on the inside was slowly taking root, making me saner, more patient, somewhat more compassionate and all of this began to effect a new view of the world which I tried hard not to concretize and make rules for. As a result, everything started to become more fiuid, less frightening, and more surprising, both inside me and around me, and I started thinking maybe that was enough for a while. Belief systems, I started to realize, were wish lists. Things you'd like to be true. They were not immutable laws."
He then says "what follows is not a manifesto, not a prescription for the world--instead it's just a few descriptions of some of what I've experienced, seen, and heard that have moved me to continue in a path of what will hopefully be less and less dogma and greater flexibility and surprise....I'm sure these stories like the ones that follow occur more frequently than we know, but I think most people relegate them to an overactive fantasy life, or a momentary hallucination or simply dismiss them because they don't fit into a mundane and comfortable conception of 'the way things are.' For me, they represent a handhold into a connection we have with a reality that is deeper, broader, and more inspiring than anything we can possibly conceive." [emphasis added]
