Common Sense

“The basic level of practical knowledge and judgment.”

Where the heck did it go? I look around and it seems that common sense has left the building. I’ve been looking around for it and this is what I’ve found.

Common sense is a skill. We get trained, or not, in common sense, and this happens on many levels through our development. How was common sense being practiced while growing up? What was happening in the primary family? Whatever configuration you experienced, common sense was revealed to you in how it was being practiced around you. We have several possible responses to experiences: inherit, learn, and/or rebel.

We partially inherit the selves we are closest to growing up. Attitudes get absorbed, generational wounds seep in, and behaviors are adopted. When a pattern fills a basic need, we are attracted to that pattern. The culture, communities, institutions and social norms are the soup we swim in and become ingrained through a kind of osmosis. Through these things and some other factors, our own practice of common sense is formed.

It seems those having experienced hardships in life often come away with a better common sense. Sometimes it takes those kinds of occurences to beat a little sense into us. And that’s part of what happens. If we are paying attention, we will learn something, gain some sense. Other’s lives see little hardship, but this doesn’t mean no common sense. There are too many variables to be definitive.

The best practice related to common sense is to PAY ATTENTION! When the majority of our attention is inward, we just miss what’s going on around us. Assessing our situation has value. Not obsessive assessing, practical assessing. This means we look for proof, we ground our assessments and act accordingly. We don’t just accept things at face value or just because it fits into a scheme of what we want to be true.

When we feel the possibility for a response or action move in us, it becomes easier to trust that feeling through embodying the combination of paying attention, practical assessing, and past experiences. Like anything else, this requires practice, but “right practice.” What do I want to stop doing? What do I want to start doing? How do I interrupt a deep, old, well-practiced pattern?

There is no switch to flip to make this happen. It takes a good common sense approach to long term change.