All in all, it's a lot of work to be open-minded. It's much easier to have knee-jerk reactions.

Being able to realize that just because you like and dislike certain things, that it doesn't mean it's&that way for others.

Most of all, it's being willing to accept people who are different from you without deciding that there's something bad about them just because it's different.

If you treat others as you would have them treat you, you are open-minded by default. You are automatically open to other's opinions because you would wish them to be open to yours.

{ }pen!

your mind.

what an esoteric injunction. were my open mind a river it would ultimately settle into swamps. were it narrow its force would eventually throw it off a cliff. somewhere in between, the rivers flow into the great sea.

is this a plea to erase judgement? openminded-ness is not state, rather perhaps a struggle to be free. from the mind? ... oops, there's the m-word again. i am drawn to melodrame's conclusion: to have no mind at all. but then, as i said, that's esoteric knowledge and the whole shebang is a futile circularity.

{}pen mind: esoteric, -ness, swamp, rather, perhaps, struggle, free, no-mind, futile, circularity ...
narrow mind: injunction, judgement, state, river, conclusion

.

i dont seem to have worked it out yet. and my cultural milieu makes it much more the poignant: as a christian contemplating marriage to a moslem we are faced with absurd social restrictions (assuming we are open minded). our union entails: 1) my imprisonment (fact: it is a crime for a non-moslem man to marry a moslem woman) 2) being cut off from our families (possible fact) 3) being murdered (possible fact: it is common for moslem women who marry non-moslem men to be killed by their family to save face).

hence the price of { }pen mind there for ya.

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
-- Terry Pratchett, "Diggers"

It's hubris to think that you already know everything that there is to know, so it's important to be open-minded about new ideas. But that doesn't mean that you have to agree with or incorporate them. People can be still be wrong, after all, even in this enlightened age.