I am in the midst of reading one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read: Ellen Langer’s Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility
For example, her research has clearly demonstrated that believing eyesight degrades with age results in eyesight that degrades with age, whereas not having the belief correlates very well not having degraded eyesight.
I can testify to the power of this particular belief, in that I have refused to believe that aging would require me to constantly get new eye glasses. I’ve not had to get new eye glasses in almost 15 years. Instead of believing that my eyes would degrade every year, I believed they would stay in shape if I exercised them sufficiently. I made a habit of doing without my glasses as much as possible, forcing my eyes to adjust.
Our beliefs can even impact whether we survive cancer. Those who see having cancer as a certain death sentence are more likely to usher that sentence in than those who believe they can defeat it.
The key takeaway is that we can often choose our beliefs. (Not always, of course: believing you can survive a fall from the Empire State building is not going to make that belief work.)
When I woke up this morning, I realized that this applied as much to our beliefs about the Big Picture as to our beliefs about our health. For years I have struggled with whether to believe in a God or not. The amount of suffering in the world has certainly made it difficult to be anything but agnostic, but I now realize that all of the books I’ve read on this (we’re talking a literal ton) have not proven one way or the other whether there is a God. There are some reasonable arguments on both sides.
As this was on my mind this morning, I asked myself “if I only have 5 years more to live, do I want to live it believing I have a purpose and that life has meaning, or do I just want to believe that nothing I do really matters?” I choose to live purposefully and to believe accordingly.
None of us wants to have a belief that is wrong. But, sometimes it is just not possible to know things with certainty, and you make the best decision on what to believe when you believe what serves you best.