It is human nature that causes most of us to be a skeptic. After all, no one wants to be fooled or taken down a crooked path.
What fascinates me is the triggers that tell me when to turn on or off the skeptic in me.
If I am on a journey or a mission that requires new information and learning, I am rarely a skeptic. Instead, I find myself more like a sponge, accumulating, absorbing, then sorting out reams of new inputs. I willingly take in that which seems to add to my database on a particular subject until I have settled on what works and what doesn't.
Then I switch from student to skeptic.
When I am in the mode of preserving what has for me become the status quo—I've made up my mind about this or that—whatever new challenges come my way are judged more as obstacles than new info.
Perhaps this comes about as a means of protection to a model I have constructed of what works and what doesn't. Protection because I require some level of certainty in my life in order to navigate through the maze of life's confusion.
None of us are permanent skeptics just as none of us are constant learners.
It's helpful to me to remember I am both skeptic and student.
