“I feel I change my mind all the time. And I sort of feel that’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself regularly, then you’re not thinking.” – Malcolm Gladwell.

In our culture, it’s common for people who change their minds to be ridiculed or trivialized. Our public figures and leaders are supposed to never change their minds, and if they do, they are ridiculed as false or hypocritical.

When is the last time you heard someone in public life say, “I made a mistake. I changed my mind.”

Like Mr. Gladwell, I change my mind constantly and abruptly and easily. I agree that changing my mind is not a symptom of being weak or foolish, but of thinking.

I’ve never read about a great thinker or true intellectual who didn’t change his or her mind at the drop of a hat.

Our President is clearly a person who cannot change his mind. He’s not a role model for me.

Socrates famously told his students that the first death, the death of the mind, comes when people will no longer change their minds. I’m not yet ready to die.

Almost every good and important thing in my life – from Maria to photography to my blog to Zinnia to the farm – to my restored heart  and exercising – has come from changing my mind.

I pray I never stop.

Many of you have followed my long-standing squawking about unwanted advice or social media mind police. I’ve been working on this issue and have gotten more accepting of people’s need to tell me what they think I should do with my life, and it’s challenging.

It seems to be a natural outcome of social media.

I got a good example of the stir changing my mind caused again this week when I posted several fairly rigid messages on my blog, abruptly refusing to agree with people who insisted that I buy a snowblower, or admitting that I need one.

I am very quick to make up my mind and even quicker to change it. This, to me, is the very embodiment of intelligence. When I think of the people who never change my mind, I never see anyone I like or respect.

Several – about five – of my blog readers send me snarky messages gloating about my decision to buy a battery snowblower after  three days of shoveling and sending me messages like this one:

“Eva: If I were reading about a character in a novel who said the above, I would be curious why s/he could not just accept advice, however uninformed, understanding the warm concern of the affection motivating it. Why does s/he feel the necessity of scolding then shaming?
Why the brittle stiffening toward that affection? That becomes the more interesting question and what I would hope the unfolding novel would reveal.
In any case, it’s better than writing about that guy in D.C.”

Where does this obnoxious idea come from that I have to take everyone else’s advice or offer elaborate responses and apologies for not taking it?

Read the news. This isn’t shaming.

I’m not sure that I have to choose between writing about a snowblower and the President; it seems to me I can do both when appropriate. They are both good subjects.

But I was struck by the huffy tone of the message. I didn’t shame anybody or even come close in the snowblower exchanges; I just said I didn’t want a snowblower (Maria and I have talked about this often, and we both agreed about it.)

I get lots of messages, and I don’t always have the time for lengthy explanations.

In all these years of drowning in advice online, I’ve noticed that most people who give advice put a string on one end – they want you to take it.

If you don’t and refuse without apology, you are often nasty, or “shaming” them, or being stubborn and ill-tempered.

I’ve never found a way to turn advice down that doesn’t irk people who feel their advice is sacred and must be accepted.

I was drawn to Eva’s line “brittle stiffening.” She meant it as an insult, but I think she was revealing more than she knew. (This is a disagreement, Eva, not a “shaming.” If you think those comments were nasty, you must live in a tunnel. You can look them both up.)

Merriam-Webster defines “shaming” as an act or activity of subjecting someone to shame, disgrace, humiliation, or disrepute especially by public exposure or criticism.”

Really, Eva, saying I didn’t want or need a snowblower cause these people humiliation and disrepute? That’s a pretty low bar. I’m not made of crystal, and people who are might not be comfortable reading my blog.

Changing my mind means opening it up, not freezing it. A “brittle stiffening” sounds like something that happens with an enema, not an idea.

In my mind, honesty required me to post the change in my mind. I think that was a good thing to do, even if some people find it cruel. I went back online to thank the good person who suggested the battery-powered blowers to me.

I told her I wouldn’t get one. I changed my mind.

I completely accept that most advice is well-meaning and meant to be helpful. But that doesn’t mean I have to take it.

When you let someone else change your mind, you rob yourself of certainty. When you choose to change your mind, you are using your intelligence to the best of its miraculous ability to digest things and change.

Maria and I were shoveling and shoveling last week, and one reader sent good and useful advice: she alerted me to the relatively new effectiveness of ion-battery powered snow blowers.

I admit my sore back and legs softened me up a bit on the subject.

Maria and I never got one because we are committed to supporting the environment, and we thought all snowblowers were gasoline-powered.  We assumed the battery-powered ones were too weak for upstate New York. We had decided not to do get a gasoline-powered machine, which was the primary reason we didn’t want one.

I spent a good long time researching these new blowers as I thawed out from the big storm – the reviews and comments and stories online persuaded me they could be useful to us, that the technology had changed, and I brought this new idea to Maria, and she agreed, so we went ahead and bought them.

I went back on my blog posts and explained my decision to each person I had “shamed.” I am learning to listen carefully to advice, even when it’s bad.

And I hope I never lose the ability to change my mind on a dime. To me, the very definition of intelligence is the best way to learn and grow. That’s why it’s so important to write about it.

No other species on the earth is endowed with the ability to change their minds, and I consider it a sacred tenet of humanity.

I think it’s important to share the Byzantine process in my mind with the gracious people to follow me. It’s a wild ride, but you are welcome to come along.

I’ll also be honest about this. It isn’t Eva’s business or anybody else’s business to know the details of every thought process or action or change of mind that Maria and I undergo.

My ethos about advice is unchanged, even after years of arguing about it online.

Fools don’t take advice, and smart people don’t need it.

So I very rarely give it.  When I encounter a problem online or off, I don’t consider it to mine, unless asked. My advice, when offered, is intended to help, not bully.

That’s how I deal with it. I am very careful about where I go for advice, and it’s rarely from strangers on the Internet.

At various points in my life, I have been both a fool and a smart person. I’ve learned a lot from both.