Learn and Do Otherwise…

So many times we talk about how we were brought up and what we learned and/or inherited from our parents or the people at our churches, or synagogues, or at boy scouts. We talk about our physical attributes and habitual social quirk all the time: we got our eyes from this relative, our body shape from the other, the temper that flares can be ascribed to our ethnicity. These instances aside, most times, we do comparisons regarding the negative aspects of our personalities, habits, or thoughts. Meaning, usually, although we may honor this person or that person (usually after they have passed on from this life) for their positive contribution or contributions to us, generally-speaking positive credit is ascribed far less than blame for our shortcomings.

We spend inordinate amounts of time assigning blame to others for how we have turned out as adults. We assign others with the “credit” for how and who we are. Case-in-point, we turned out the way we did because our mother was an alcoholic, our father a drug-dealer, or our mother didn’t show us enough love as a child, or father was a workaholic and cold, hardly showing affection.

I would propose that if we spent less time using the people who introduced us to bad habits, addictions, warped senses of understanding, and the like, as whipping boards for what is “ours,” and instead saw them and their influence on us as pivotal moments in our lives, perhaps we would be far happier people. Happier, I say? Yes, happier. Because we would be more inclined to living our true selves.

Bear with me, here, as I elaborate.

Your mother and/or father were overly-critical. At 40 – 50 years old, you yourself notice that you have eerily similar tendencies to nit-pick, or to be overly sensitive to things being just so. Mind you, as a child, or growing up, you hated this quality, this trait about your parent. But somehow as you practice the same thing you have learned, you forget to think how it feels to be on the receiving end of their criticism, often unrelenting scrutiny, in a moment that is very vulnerable for the other person. You have forgotten the visceral response you had to the act of pouring acid on an open wound. Brutal analogy but is it really that “off” when one thinks about how opposite what the perpetrator must have been thinking was prior to being faced with the reality that he or she now faces?

So maybe if and when those moments come about when we find yourself identifying these bothersome traits, perhaps instead of falling victim to replicating those traits, we saw it for what it was, we would realize that even as we have lived through it – felt the pain, the betrayal, the sting, the shunning – we felt it so that we could know its effects first-hand and choose to do something different. There was a lesson in it all. If it were intended that we should be shackled by things that happened to us, we would be an extension, a continuation of our parents, or perpetual victims of our situations. But as genetics would have it, we are a totally different organism from anyone else in the world. Our unique genetic combination provides us with the opportunity to do and to be something altogether different from our two chromosomal donors. In short, we inherit stuff, yes, but our experiences are only raw material. We get the chance to interpret and move a thing one step further by either perpetuating it or killing it at the root by speaking out against it: the bigotry, the hatred, the wrongness of a thing. Or by beginning a correction to a thing through a simple act, setting a different course for the future of a thought or a movement.  Either way, intentionally or not, we always pay it forward.

We actually have that power. We have this capacity. And we possess this capability because we have a conscience that continuously cries out NOT to be suppressed about our moral receptors. Pain is uncomfortable, yes. It is not pleasant, and therefore most folks don’t want to necessarily experience it. And those of us who learn to become “comfortable” with the pain, do so only at the risk of being desensitized to what pain is supposed to do. Pain is intended to be a signal that something that is being done is offensive to us, in some way or another. Whether literally or figuratively, it is to tell us that something is wrong with our body, or that we have exceeded our threshold, or else to alarm us to be aware of some act or thought or sentiment that is being forced on us that is out of the ordinary. At the very least, it calls us to attention.

So then enter the assertion that out of painful experiences, one can experience happiness. If pain without remedy is unhappiness because things remain unresolved, then pain that leads to realization of the source of our illness, brings relief and sets us on the road to remedying the situation. And this makes us both relieved and happy. How many people have spoken of the moment that they recognized a pain that led them to the doctor, that led to a diagnosis of the presence of a cancer that enabled them to live through bouts of cancer treatment – the operative word being “live”? It was seen as a mixed blessing not because anyone wants cancer. But if you have cancer and can do something to overcome the challenge, wouldn’t most people want to? Even people who profess to have faith do not truly know they have faith until challenged by circumstances that put that faith to the test.

I return to my original proposal: that each of us would do well to give ourselves permission to think about the things that we have learned and have allowed to become part of our habits, practices and thinking, and test the outcomes of these actions and attitudes as they have played out in our individual lives. Heck, even to measure the weight of our practices by our hearts: If it makes us more empathetic, more understanding, more patient, more well-rounded and yet better decision-makers, then yay for our “education!” If not, perhaps we need to own what we have done with what we’ve inherited. Much like what we must do when it comes to challenges to climate control, and racial and gender inequity, and policy discrimination against those in same-sex relationships, people with mental disorders, and those with physical disabilities, just for starters.  The truth is we didn’t always learn the right things from our parents (either due to imperfection or intentional brainwashing). But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn the lessons surrounding the consequences of what we do and how we think. As the old folks used to say: “The proof [really] is in the pudding.”