Keeping an Open Mind

‘The more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a
commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.’
‘THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE’
In sporting parlance, Holmes was extremely adept at playing what was in front of him. That is to say, whatever plans he may have had up his sleeve,
he would alter them to suit the scenario in which he found himself. No matter how odd or surprising a situation became, he kept his mind open to all
sorts of extraordinary possibilities. He realised that just because something seemed unlikely, it was not impossible. Such flexibility of thinking was
crucial to his solving many a case.
For us mere mortals, having our presumptions knocked to pieces can be an extremely disconcerting experience and throws many of us off kilter,
rendering us unable to deal with a new situation or to process a new piece of information. We are so sure that we are right about so many things
that the possibility we may actually be wrong about them is all but inconceivable to us.
History throws up plenty of examples of lack of open-mindeness. Galileo had a very serious falling-out with the Roman Catholic Church over his
insistence that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round – a proposition few would have trouble accepting today. Yet still we
accept all sorts of ideas as irrefutable truth when, in fact, they are simply not true. Consider a few of these urban myths.
The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object on Earth visible from the moon. False – it is not visible from the moon.



President Kennedy told the German people that he was a jelly doughnut. False. It is true that in a 1963 speech he said ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. It
is also true that there is a certain kind of doughnut called a Berliner. If, as it is often said he should have, Kennedy had said ‘Ich bin Berliner’,
he would have been suggesting he was a native of the city, which he wasn’t. His formulation was grammatically correct and put across his
desired sentiment: he was at one with the people of Berlin.
To demonstrate the limitations of kingly power, Canute, the eleventh century King of England, commanded the sea to halt before it wet his feet.
False. The story is almost certainly apocryphal.
Sherlock Holmes was real. He wasn’t. Honestly. To be able to maintain openness of mind is a potent skill and requires of us that we do not
spring to judgement or take things at face value, nor refuse to countenance that what we thought was one thing is actually another.