A wonderful author named Parker J. Palmer introduced me to the concept of Big Ideas. As I now use the term, a Big Idea is an idea that makes all other ideas easier to understand. Each Big Idea is not necessarily complicated, especially after you discover it. In fact, they can each be expressed in a short, declarative sentence.

We don’t usually think in Big Ideas, mostly because we get caught up in living and trying to solve our problems and hoping we don’t get caught looking stupid. We also don’t tend to share Big Ideas when we find them because they suddenly seem obvious, and we think we’re the last one to figure them out. But the truth of the matter is that discovering Big Ideas is a joy and a great relief. Big Ideas make life easier to deal with. Here are a few of my top favorites; the first three are related:

• Knowledge changes all the time. Nobody seems to mention that notion very often; maybe they find it embarrassing or scary. Think about it. We spent year after year in school learning information that has not remained the same! Science has come to acknowledge that. Accounts of history finally show more than one perspective and include women and minorities who never appeared before. Even permissible sentence structure and language usage changes. Like awesome, Dude.

• You can’t know something until you know it. You’re thinking that’s a statement of the obvious, but consider how many times you’ve felt like a complete idiot for not knowing something— simply because you didn’t know it yet.

Here is a corollary: we also can’t become self-aware until it happens.

The other side of that idea is that once you know something, you can’t return to not knowing it. (3)  We’re not capable of un-knowing or un-evolving.