Tag Archives: difference

Jun 22 2012

Bliss Difference Foxtrot

The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the word foxtrot is the comic strip by Bill Amend that I remember from years ago when I was growing up.   The funny pages are one of the things I miss the most from the days of print newspapers.  The foxtrot is also a dance.   Just click here if you would like a video lesson.  As words go, foxtrot seems to me a much easier word to blog about than difference.

I can’t say that I have been experiencing any sort of bliss lately.   Not that things are going terribly badly.  But nothing is going really well and I seem to just slog from day to day,  making it through one day at a time and trying not to worry too much about tomorrow.    I know of course that things could be so, So, SO much worse for me and my family,  so I try to count my blessings each day and not stress over things that are not as I would have them be.   The thing about bliss, it seems to me, is that it is something you can experience,  if you leave yourself open to the serendipity of the universe.  But it’s not something you can actively plan for or make happen.

Differences,  it seems to me, are what can divide us.   Unless we truly value diversity and celebrate the differences between us,  without letting them come between us.   It sometimes seems to me that we humans assume a great deal about other people.   Most of the time I don’t think this is malicious,  near so much as naive.    We assume that people we know and value look at the world in similar ways to us,  take similar approaches to moral questions or approach their lives in the similar ways to how we approach ours.   And it’s always very jarring when we discover it simply is not true.    In my heart I know that celebrating our diversity is the path to greater human understanding.   Even though in my head I know that sometimes this is really hard.

Apr 8 2011

Folders

I’m thinking this morning about the many different folders we tend to tuck people we meet into.   Over on Empire Avenue for instance,  most everyone has some set of criteria for whom they put into their “Newbie Folder”.   And I doubt there are many human beings on earth who don’t, at least to some degree keep an “Assholes Folder”.     Categorization is useful certainly, and just as certainly necessary–  the thousands of books in your local library would be of very little use to you, if not for the librarians who carefully classify and categorize Everything and the scores of library pages who spend their days putting books back on the shelf and making sure everything is in order.

But most of us do not have master’s degrees in library science and are at times ill-equipped to quickly categorize and classify the dozens or hundreds we meet over the course of a day, a month, a lifetime.    A book that deals extensively with seven different subjects, dozens of sub-topics, multiple authors and such can easily take a professional librarian hours of work to accurately classify and create a good bibliographic record.   Most people, in my experience are at least as complicated as the most complex book I have ever handled.   Yet more often than not,  we usually just stick people into one particular folder.   And the folder that we decide to stick someone in,  usually fairly soon after first meeting them,  will to a fairly large extent color and even direct all of our subsequent interactions with them.  

People who fit into a folder that is easily labeled (deaf, blind, gay, blue-eyed, big-breasted, well endowed, tall, short, fat, skinny, shy, assertive, crippled, amputated, injured, ill, smart, funny, etc. etc) often find it Very difficult to get folks to see them as anything But the folder they got filed in.   It doesn’t really matter than in many cases the file highlights something the filer considers quite good.   It is not much easier to move beyond being listed in everyone’s braniac file than in everyone’s crippled file.    Somehow I doubt I will persuade the bulk of the people out there to rush out and sign up for Library school.   But I do ask that today you make a special effort to file anyone you meet into at least three different folders.  

That’s my thought for the day.  Here’s wishing you a fantastic Friday!