Hello Thomas,

Well, I suspect you would get hurt. And then you make some adjustments and trust again. Guess what, you might get it wrong a time or two, or even three or four. So you adjust again. It's called learning! Either that, or you live inside of what did hurt, and you continue to repeat, to repeat, to repeat what it is you don't want.

Also, there are certainly things worth over-generalizing, something that did hurt is simply not one of them. There is another way. If you start off by considering across context any belief you want to install with your future in mind, chances are you will not have to be concerned with ecology. It will take care of itself.

Even better yet, learn how to effectively calibrate. Not only other people, but yourself. It's impossible to always get anything perfectly right. But what doesn't yet work is merely feed-forward. Build in recursion, this way you can use all experience as part of the process called learning.

My three year old niece wanted to, no! -- insisted on playing with one of my cacti. At first I thought I would save her the pain, later I let her win. She wound up learning through her own experience what she soon won't forget. Yet, and on the same hand, that one experience did nothing to stop her from exploring other things with her sense of touch. Even other kinds of plants. I guess her secret is simple. Rather than relying on some preset theory, any past internal image, she is trusting her experience to guide the way. She can make the distinction between what is occurring on the inside, and that which is occurring on the outside. She remains curiously adventurous.

This notion of ecology can be useful, but it can also lead toward paralysis. I would prefer attempting something that was not totally safe, rather than finding myself having to hold back because of an idea. I guess you could always build in a strategy that automatically updates any previous experiences. This way you, like my three year old niece, can learn how to experience newness. Nothing in this universe repeats itself -- exactly. There will always be differences. Even subtle ones. And, if you tune yourself up to begin noticing what these differences may be, your ability to make more accurate decisions that lead toward more useful behaviors about what to do next, will increase.

Rather than waiting around for the next ecological fix, try things. You could have been wrong in the first place. Perhaps the ecological decision to not do, was based on what you had yet to update from your own past experience. Here you are on a boat, and the anchor falls overboard. You grab the rope, and it isn't tied to anything. Now you find yourself being pulled under with that anchor. Do you continue holding on? Or do you say to yourself - it's only an anchor! There is a choice.

Be well

Carmine Baffa