Who Are You?
What do you think people will say at your funeral? What do you want them to say? Or would you prefer they forgo words and express themselves through interpretive dance?
Today I attended the funeral of a friend's stepdad. I got the impression he was an amazing and multifaceted man who led a long and complex life filled with love and service, and also a fair amount of difficulty. Not for the first time, it made me wish that I had known my dad more fully, not just as my dad, or my mom's nemesis, or as Goodtime Gordie, but as a unique and real person. Of course I wish I had known my mom better, too, but my dad was always more of an enigma.
If I have any advice to give to those whose parents are still living, it's not to love your parents or appreciate them more. Oh sure, if you can do that, that's awesome, but you probably are already loving and appreciating them as much as you can. But are you paying attention? Try to learn about them, and notice them, and see them not just through the lens of the role they play in your lives. Soak up those stories about their childhood and those moments of their lives that haven't revolved around you.
Good advice, but I probably wouldn't follow it, even if I could. It's not just our parents that we don't see as fully dimensional, but all our loved ones, friends, co-workers, even ourselves. People are complicated and contradictory and messy. It's hard to face all that complexity. We want our lives and the people in them to be neat and tidy and comprehensible, so we usually see each other in terms of our roles and relationships. And there really is a lot to be said for that. We are who we are in relation to and connections with others. Our relationships and our bonds and our communities do make us who we are to a large extent. In Unitarian Universalism our Seventh Principle is the respect for the interdependent web of life, and our lives are played out in those complex threads of connections to other.
And what does it mean to know a person, anyway? Sure, we can know a lot of "facts" about someone, but that doesn't necessarily mean we understand them or are close to them. Yet sometimes, all those little mundane things we do know about someone, "the way you wear your hat, the way you sing off-key, the meaning of all that" (thank you Frank Sinatra)...those little things do actually mean a lot. Or we might not know much about someone at all and still feel we know some truth about them and have a connection.
However we definite "knowing," we can never fully know another person, and probably wouldn't want to, but I think we should avoid being lazy. It's easy and safe to let our preconceptions and expectations of people, especially those we know and love well, guide us. But by taking that easy way, we will miss out on seeing some meaningful aspects of others. I'm not saying we will understand or even like everything we see. Again, we like things to make sense, and it's hard when people aren't this OR that but this AND that, especially when those things don't seem to go together. Or at least we don't want them to go together. I love the line from Todd Snider's song "Just Like Old Times" when a cop tells the song protagonist that his friend is a prostitute, and he replies "I'm sure she is but that's not all she is."
I think this post is a lot like the post I wrote after Robin Williams died, so I guess these are ideas I'm pretty interested in. Sure, I'm someone who likes to blog about the same topic obsessively while I stay up too late and eat too many chips and drink too much red wine, but that's not all I am. Who knows, I may harbor a secret love of interpretive dance.
Today I attended the funeral of a friend's stepdad. I got the impression he was an amazing and multifaceted man who led a long and complex life filled with love and service, and also a fair amount of difficulty. Not for the first time, it made me wish that I had known my dad more fully, not just as my dad, or my mom's nemesis, or as Goodtime Gordie, but as a unique and real person. Of course I wish I had known my mom better, too, but my dad was always more of an enigma.
If I have any advice to give to those whose parents are still living, it's not to love your parents or appreciate them more. Oh sure, if you can do that, that's awesome, but you probably are already loving and appreciating them as much as you can. But are you paying attention? Try to learn about them, and notice them, and see them not just through the lens of the role they play in your lives. Soak up those stories about their childhood and those moments of their lives that haven't revolved around you.
Good advice, but I probably wouldn't follow it, even if I could. It's not just our parents that we don't see as fully dimensional, but all our loved ones, friends, co-workers, even ourselves. People are complicated and contradictory and messy. It's hard to face all that complexity. We want our lives and the people in them to be neat and tidy and comprehensible, so we usually see each other in terms of our roles and relationships. And there really is a lot to be said for that. We are who we are in relation to and connections with others. Our relationships and our bonds and our communities do make us who we are to a large extent. In Unitarian Universalism our Seventh Principle is the respect for the interdependent web of life, and our lives are played out in those complex threads of connections to other.
And what does it mean to know a person, anyway? Sure, we can know a lot of "facts" about someone, but that doesn't necessarily mean we understand them or are close to them. Yet sometimes, all those little mundane things we do know about someone, "the way you wear your hat, the way you sing off-key, the meaning of all that" (thank you Frank Sinatra)...those little things do actually mean a lot. Or we might not know much about someone at all and still feel we know some truth about them and have a connection.
However we definite "knowing," we can never fully know another person, and probably wouldn't want to, but I think we should avoid being lazy. It's easy and safe to let our preconceptions and expectations of people, especially those we know and love well, guide us. But by taking that easy way, we will miss out on seeing some meaningful aspects of others. I'm not saying we will understand or even like everything we see. Again, we like things to make sense, and it's hard when people aren't this OR that but this AND that, especially when those things don't seem to go together. Or at least we don't want them to go together. I love the line from Todd Snider's song "Just Like Old Times" when a cop tells the song protagonist that his friend is a prostitute, and he replies "I'm sure she is but that's not all she is."
I think this post is a lot like the post I wrote after Robin Williams died, so I guess these are ideas I'm pretty interested in. Sure, I'm someone who likes to blog about the same topic obsessively while I stay up too late and eat too many chips and drink too much red wine, but that's not all I am. Who knows, I may harbor a secret love of interpretive dance.
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