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Resilient thought can survive discovering that it was wrong.

Discernment must be able to turn on itself, testing and revising the conclusions it has already made.

Fear and shame can magnify a small error into a consequential failure.

Conceding a position when the evidence changes is better thinking, not weakness.

Fall down seven, get back up eight. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Just do it. Stay the course. For God’s sake, keep going. Wagons, ho! There is something ruggedly American and individualistic about relentless persistence. It's better than capitulation, I suppose.

Angela Duckworth’s 2016 book Grit offers a far more nuanced investigation of persistence. It is more than just getting back on the horse and moving forward. Changing course can serve a larger commitment rather than betray it. Still, the life-is-war metaphor remains. Holding one’s ground is strong. Conceding ground is weak.

Most of life, though, is not lived at the mission-critical edge of catastrophe or conquest. We engage in the performance of everyday life. We deal with what is happening and what to do next. Yet, lax habits of mind around nominal stakes can creep into disastrous circumstances. We need to improve our perceptual literacy. That literacy is part of the practice of discernment.

I want to linger over the capacity to adjust. What allows us to catch a read that has gone wrong while we are still living inside it? To earn its name, discernment requires a mechanism for self-correction. Finding out sooner that we’re wrong, and staying wrong less, is a resilience of thought. Finding out we’re not quite right can knock us off balance. What we do next determines whether the error gets corrected or defended.

Being wrong is too frequent a thing to think of as anomalous. Discernment requires an internal governance system that holds us accountable to what we think we know — a fault-detection system.........

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