Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Light behaves like a particle in one experiment and like a wave in another, and physicists live with both. That is a good picture for two accounts of one event, and a picture is all it is.
Reaching for a big idea from physics can settle the room while proving nothing at all. Use it the way you would use a photograph: helpful for seeing, useless as evidence. The honest version is smaller and steadier anyway. Two people describing the same afternoon differently is ordinary, not a paradox.
Qur’an and Sunnah
There truly are signs in the creation of the heavens and earth, and in the alternation of night and day, for those with understanding (Quran 3:190). Creation is offered as something to look at and think with, not as a debating point to win with.
إِنَّ فِي خَلۡقِ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَٱخۡتِلَٰفِ ٱلَّيۡلِ وَٱلنَّهَارِ لَأٓيَٰتࣲ لِّأُوْلِي ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ
There truly are signs in the creation of the heavens and earth, and in the alternation of night and day, for those with understanding
Qur’an 3:190read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review and meta-analysis of mindfulness-based stress reduction in healthy people reported reductions in stress and improvements in wellbeing, and the same authors flagged methodological weaknesses in many of the studies. That mix is the honest state of most of this material: worth doing, oversold when described as settled. Treat the analogy the same way you treat the evidence, as useful and provisional.
Chiesa A, Serretti A. (2009). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis.. Journal of alternative and complementary medicine (New York, N.Y.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Having a picture for two true accounts makes it easier to stop insisting that one of you must be lying.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
You get one life, and spending the whole of it at war with how it turned out is a heavy price to pay for being right.
Not knowing what somebody else is carrying is reason enough to go easy on them. It is certainty about what they deserve that gives cruelty its permission.
Light bounces off a face, lands at the back of your eye, and becomes a signal your brain assembles into a person. What you see is a reconstruction, a very good one, and never quite the thing itself.