Who Told Us This?

Recent experiences have made me think differently about generational differences. I have come to realize that people often make decisions based on the information available to them, the experiences they have had, and what their environment allowed them to learn.

I remember when I had my child. My grandmother, of blessed memory, would occasionally cut a piece of thread and place it on my child’s head, directly over the fontanelle. She did it several times, and I never questioned it until the last time. I asked her, “Of what use is this?” She answered, “It is for the fontanelle to develop properly.” I was disappointed. I had expected a more grounded explanation. I told her that a piece of thread had no significance to the child’s soft spot and that, with time, the fontanelle would naturally close as the child grew.

At the time, I saw the practice simply as something that did not make sense. Looking back, I began to consider that my grandmother might have been doing what she had been taught, what she had seen others do, and what she had come to believe was right. To her, it was not necessarily a practice that needed to be questioned. It was knowledge that had been handed down.

That experience made me wonder how much of what we call knowledge is actually inherited belief. There are things I have observed in people from the older generation that I simply cannot conform to, and I sometimes find myself thinking, I would never do that. But I have also had to pause and ask myself whether some of those choices were simply products of their time. Another way of seeing things was never presented to them. What seems obvious to me today may not have been obvious to them because they were working with a different set of information, circumstances, and possibilities.

Then again, I look at the generation after mine, and I am sometimes struck by how differently they reason. Their willingness to challenge assumptions often strikes me. In some areas, their thinking is remarkably advanced. Probably, that’s what happens when each generation inherits the knowledge and experience of the one before it, then adds what it discovers for itself.

Every generation has its strengths and blind spots. The real wisdom may lie in being able to recognise both. We should inherit knowledge without blindly inheriting every assumption that came with it, respect the people who came before us without accepting every belief they held, appreciate tradition without allowing it to become a substitute for thought.

And progress is not about proving that those before us were wrong. It is about seeing what they could not see because we are standing somewhere different. Our responsibility is not to hand the next generation a finished world; it is to give them enough knowledge to understand where we came from, wisdom to recognise what is worth keeping, and freedom to question what deserves to be questioned.

Some truths are inherited, some are discovered, and some must be questioned before they can truly become our own.

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What knowledge was passed down to you that you have always wondered or doubted?