Ideologies and Weeds: Rethinking What We Think We Know

Savouring Simple Daily Pleasures

 We all have ideologies. They’re like regional accents—something we carry with us, shaping how we speak, think, and move through the world, often without ever noticing. You might not realize your voice has a certain lilt until someone from somewhere else points it out. In the same way, your beliefs—about politics, success, nature, people—feel like common sense, until you meet someone whose “common sense” looks completely different.

Ideologies are inherited, absorbed, shaped by our families, our cultures, our environments. And just like accents, they can shift over time, soften, strengthen, even disappear under the right pressures. But they’re always there, influencing how we see the world.

Take, for example, the way we think about nature. Most of us were taught to pull weeds out of the garden. Weeds are bad. Weeds are unwanted. But what is a weed, really?

A weed is just a plant that happens to be growing in the wrong place.

That’s it. That’s the whole definition. A dandelion isn’t a villain in its own story. It’s just thriving where we didn’t expect—or want—it to. It’s a matter of perspective. In a lawn, it's a nuisance. In herbal medicine, it's a treasure trove of benefits. Same plant, different ideology.

What if we applied that thinking to people? To ideas? To ourselves?

Maybe some of the “weeds” in our lives—those stray thoughts, different opinions, or unexpected changes—aren’t wrong, just… unplanned. Maybe they’re just things we haven’t learned to see the value in yet. Maybe they’re even trying to teach us something, about adaptability, resilience, or rethinking our assumptions.

The world is full of things we’ve labeled—right, wrong, natural, unnatural, successful, failed. But those labels often say more about our ideologies than the things themselves. And like accents, we don’t always hear our own until someone else points them out.

So next time you’re quick to judge something—a person, a belief, a plant—ask yourself: is this really “wrong,” or is it just out of place in the mental garden I’ve inherited?

We don’t have to pull every weed. Sometimes, letting something grow where it wasn’t “meant” to be is exactly what the ecosystem—of a garden, or a mind—needs.