The Wheels on the Bus

      
This post was inspired by singing The Wheels on the Bus with my kids. I had no idea what a controversial song it is. 

I started to sing the version I grew up with, adding a few verses I’ve learned as an adult. “The Daddies on the bus say ‘Knock it off—‘”

“No Mommy,” says my pre-schooler, “It’s not the Daddy who says that, it’s the teacher.”

“Okay, let’s try this verse: The driver on the bus says, ‘Ticket please—“

“No,” he interrupts again. “The driver says, ‘Move on back.’”

The song continues on. My kids don’t like the verse about mommy saying “Shhh shhh shhh.” My daughter doesn’t like the verse about the dog on the bus because her nursery teacher doesn’t sing about a dog. My son thinks I’m silly because dogs don’t ride on busses. I’m beginning to see his logic and wonder why I’ve spent my whole life singing about a dog on a bus when dogs really don’t ride on busses.

We’re finally at the end. I’ve sung all the verses I know, adding and changing to fit the ones my kid’s teachers sing. “What about the money Mommy?”

I let out a sigh. “What money sweetheart?”

“The money on the bus?”

“Okay what does the money do?”

“It goes plink plink plink.”

So I sing one more verse about money going plink plink plink. What can I say? We are a multi-verse Wheels on the Bus singing family.

Silly right, the Wheels on the Bus song being so controversial? But isn’t that how controversial topics are? Silly. I was taught something my way. You were taught something your way. So which way is right? It’s easy to put up barriers that leave us unable to see other ways of looking at things. I could have told my kids, “This is the way I learned it so this is the way we are going to sing it.”

What good would that have done? I doubt we would have gotten through the whole song. My kid’s perspectives would have been tossed out, unvalued. And I would not have seen the error of my ways in singing about a dog on a bus. Instead we sang the longest version of the song I have ever sung, we had fun discovering new things about this bus together, and I came away with a greater vision of what this bus really entails.

Oh how much we could learn from each other if we just pulled down our barriers and tried to understand each other from another perspective. One night my husband and I were debating over the origins of oil. He thought oil came from old dinosaur remains and I thought oil came from the earth’s core. Where these ideas came from, it was hard to pinpoint. Turns out…we were both right…and wrong. We must have been taught competing theories in school. He had been taught that oil comes from ancient waste materials under the earth’s crust. I was taught a theory that is not commonly accepted now, that petroleum comes from carbon-bearing fluids that migrate upward from the earth’s mantle. In our young, imaginative minds, those theories were watered down to dinosaurs vs. earth’s core. It took friction between the opposing thoughts (along with our google search engine) to create greater understanding.

So why do we try so hard sometimes to keep our perspective in a safe place, free from the taint of another’s opposing perspective? In psychology, the term for these opposing thoughts that threaten our current belief patterns is cognitive dissonance. It is painful to experience cognitive dissonance so we have mechanisms to avoid it. As humans, we like order. Through language and other means, our minds make sense of the world around us and try to preserve order by avoiding opposing thoughts that will cause chaos. Some of these mechanisms include only listening to what you want to hear, avoiding uncomfortable conversations altogether, and rationalizing away thoughts that oppose your own beliefs. Another option is to face the opposing information head on, and let your original beliefs change as they need to. By coming through that cognitive dissonance to the other side we come to see a beautiful world beyond the one that our brains have created for us. Enlightenment can come as much through unlearning as it does through learning.

I just read an eye-opening book by Jung Chang called, “Wild Swans.” In it, she talks about what it was like to grow up in communist China, thinking Mao Zedong (one of the most evil men who ever lived) was basically God. He was deified by propaganda and the whole country loved him. She was told by her parents to eat all her food because she should be grateful to live under communism. “Just think about those poor children in the capitalist world who are starving.” Funny, I’ve said something similar to my own children. I will think twice next time I make a statement like that. The cognitive dissonance that Jung Chang experienced as she grew up and realized that Mao was not God and that he was actually an evil dictator, was painful and difficult. Her world was turned upside down and she had to make sense of everything again, including living in a western country where she had always believed life was hellish compared to communist run countries.

I don’t like the pain of wrestling with cognitive dissonance. It leaves me feeling like the floor has been pulled out from underneath me. My stomach gets tied in knots and I feel like I can’t see straight. But I have seen the beauty beyond the pain. There is a rich world out there full of multiple perspectives. I want to spend my time learning from them rather than arguing the rightness or wrongness of them. The only person I can prove right or wrong is myself. I’m wrong if I keep singing the way I’ve always sung just because it’s the way I’ve always sung it.

So I am interested in hearing about moments of cognitive dissonance that you have experienced. Sometimes they are funny like my kids with the Wheels on the Bus song or my husband and I with the origins of oil. Sometimes they are painful like Jung Chang’s experience. Feel free to leave a comment and share your experience with cognitive dissonance.