" Necessity delivers us from the embarrassment of choice ". - Marquis de Vauvenargues
I had to read this quote several times because I couldn't wrap my head around the placement/use of the word "embarrassment". It just didn't make sense to me. It brought to me a story my mom told me: She was at the library studying in college. It was quiet. It was comfortable. The quiet was interrupted by a reverberating sound. Someone was snoring. How annoying. She looked up and the snoring stopped. Only then did she realize that she was the one snoring in the library....( back to me and the 80's valley girl voice in my head) "So does it mean, if you're caught in like, an embarrassing situation, you have a choice to stay or get out of there? But, like, what is necessary about that?" This urged me to look up the definition. So, I've found there is a definition for embarrassment that means " to make difficult or intricate as a question or problem" (dictionary.com). And now this quote makes a whole lot of sense....
I wonder, how often do I miss things because I don't understand context, just like with this word? How often do I make assumptions about a situation in which I just don't have the knowledge to make an appropriate assessment? We do it all the time everyday. We draw from our past to make an assertion about the future. But what if you looked at a given situation that you automatically judged based on your own experience/ knowledge and stopped to learn some more information? Then a blind spot may become less blind.
I had to read this quote several times because I couldn't wrap my head around the placement/use of the word "embarrassment". It just didn't make sense to me. It brought to me a story my mom told me: She was at the library studying in college. It was quiet. It was comfortable. The quiet was interrupted by a reverberating sound. Someone was snoring. How annoying. She looked up and the snoring stopped. Only then did she realize that she was the one snoring in the library....( back to me and the 80's valley girl voice in my head) "So does it mean, if you're caught in like, an embarrassing situation, you have a choice to stay or get out of there? But, like, what is necessary about that?" This urged me to look up the definition. So, I've found there is a definition for embarrassment that means " to make difficult or intricate as a question or problem" (dictionary.com). And now this quote makes a whole lot of sense....
I wonder, how often do I miss things because I don't understand context, just like with this word? How often do I make assumptions about a situation in which I just don't have the knowledge to make an appropriate assessment? We do it all the time everyday. We draw from our past to make an assertion about the future. But what if you looked at a given situation that you automatically judged based on your own experience/ knowledge and stopped to learn some more information? Then a blind spot may become less blind.
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