By Larry Efird

After my retirement from teaching and subsequent relocation to Durham shortly thereafter, my wife and I downsized and moved into a townhouse. We love our new life and our stewardship of “less than more.” It’s been freeing, actually, not to have so much to keep up with. 

But as with all things, nothing is perfect. The townhouse we so much love has also been infested with mice on several different occasions. We’ve done everything we humanly can to send those little critters packing, even with the help of a pest control service, but they always return. 

At this point, we are winning battles, but we haven’t won the war; therefore, we thought we’d let our HOA administrator know just in case others were dealing with the same problem. My wife composed an informative email to him and wanted me to glance over it before she sent it. 

In her most recent email, she referred to the mice that were “up in the basement.” We don’t have a basement but I knew immediately what she meant, even though it was a mistake.  However, I loved the phrase so much because it was a perfect metaphor for misidentifying problems and, subsequently, their solutions.

I count myself lucky that I was often able to glean wisdom from my students when I needed it the most. They helped an older white male rid himself of some latent, yet perplexing mental biases by showing me how to better understand more than one cultural crisis prevalent in our state and nation. I suppose I had unknowingly relegated those proliferating crises to be as annoying as the “mice up in my basement.” But then I realized the “mice” were actually my own misconceptions and undetected prejudices regarding those issues. I was looking at things the wrong way. 

I had always assumed the majority of Americans could be fair and open minded when confronted by political conundrums, but during the elections of 2016, fear and suspicion began to usurp critical thinking, and along with it, any sense of kindness or fairness when dealing with anyone who held opposing opinions.  “Being right” became more important than “being just.” 

We were “looking up in the basement” for all those pesky “mice,” those emotionally charged social issues which we did not understand — or want to. Candidates and voters were choosing to ignore basic tenets of human kindness and decency in order to stay in power and to selfishly promote self-serving political agendas. And most disheartening of all, sometimes even under the guise of religion. 

An indispensable truth that helped me build relationships with my students during that time was that I sometimes had to think with my heart and not just with my head. I didn’t have to abandon my objectivity and critical thinking but I could not simply look  “up in the basement” to find a way to connect. I  had to know what I was looking for and where to find it in order to make a positive difference in their lives. I did not want to reinforce the negativity they saw coming from most adults; instead, I wanted to help them learn how to effectively communicate with those who held opposing convictions. Even if they could not agree with someone else’s worldview, they could hopefully learn how to respect that person or group of people as fellow human beings. 

I suddenly realized that I could keep on looking up in my head  to blindly fortify my “decades-old” opinions, or I could look down in my heart in order to truly listen to others who thought and felt differently about the  cultural and philosophical wars in our country. Some of those conversations were painful and humbling, but they helped me to grow and learn. 

The following words by Alfred, Lord Tennyson convey this sentiment much more adequately than I ever could: 

Let knowledge grow from more to more/But more of reverence in us dwell,

That mind and soul, according well, may make one music as before.

Until we employ both our mind and our soul to understand those who differ from us, we will continue to ignore their plight and stubbornly protect our own opinions to the detriment of everyone’s welfare, including our own. If that is the case, we might as well be looking in vain  for mice “up in the basement” or “down in the attic.” Perhaps the best place to look isn’t up or down after all, but within. And then, we might be surprised at what we find.