Why do you constantly try to get yourself confused?
That was the question my mother asked when she saw me paying for the new book i just bought. The title of the book was, "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. Her concern was understandable. Being a born-again Christian, the Catholic type, she feels offended instantly by the word "DELUSION" written on the same page with the word "GOD". Sacrilege, for her. Amusing for me.
I explained to her that I was currently reading this very nice book entitled "Mere Christianity" by a Mr. C. S. Lewis, a former atheist who wrote about philosophy and religion, and on the side, children's wardrobe adventures. And for some reason, I feel the need to expose myself to something contradictory to what I've been reading. Getting myself confused was in fact what I'd constantly do to myself. And by this time, everything to me is relative and i find myself answering a lot of "hmm maybe, it depends" to a lot of questions.
But mom, what's wrong with being confused?
That's what I said to her. Mom thinks being confused and having doubts about the divine truth is out of the question. She thinks I know what the 'right' answer is (which is to her, the divine truth) but i just decide not to admit it. To her this is just a rebellious act, a childish phase she just can't wait for me to get over. I should be more like her and skip the phase entirely out of ignorance. That said, there leaves nothing more to discuss between me and her, because we're seeing things very differently already, and there's no point of prolonging the argument.
But her question got me into thinking how being confused is a good idea. To me it's an acquired taste, the art of being confused. There is something somewhat peaceful about the state of being confused. It's as if time would wait, and when you finally had that 'eureka!' it would come to you as fast it would compensate that time you spent on being confused.
I could talk about what being confused means in Architecture. In an architecture school, the studio is the harshest and most competitive class the student had to undertake. It constantly demand something new and brilliant, therefore one cannot use only the resource one already have, which is our common sense and our memory of everything we know. Because doing so, we'd be repeating things over and over again, and eventually the ideas will run out and that's not brilliant at all. That's why in design studios, instructors came in and give us lectures, one after the other. Sometimes, in fact, a lot of times, they will contradict each other. Maybe they will even contradict our view.
There are two types of reaction to these bombardment of information: One is where you have that 'eureka!' moment and the other when you have absolutely no idea how to function, which is because you're confused. The difference between the two reaction is that the one that reacts with a 'eureka!' moment without first being ever slightly confused, will most probably end up with you copying used solutions to new problems. Sometimes they'll work, and sometimes they don't. Either way, they're not brilliant. Meanwhile when you start confusing over things, you stopped functioning, therefore you have the chance to step back and weigh up the different points of view, ideas, and solutions, to make a mental study on how it would and would not work, and at the end, you will end up with a specific solution to the specific design problem, which may or may not work. But brilliant nevertheless.
Being confused means being democratic about your view. You can't be confused if you think one point of view is right and the other wrong. Being confused means you are stripped out of prejudices and paradigm that holds you back, and lets you take on that adventure to an understanding that's truly your own.