The Sacred Point of View

  The story goes that a kindergarten pupil told his teach that he had found a cat, but it was dead.

   “How do you know the cat was dead?” she asked her pupil.

   “Because I pissed in its ear and it didn’t move,” the child replied.

   “You did WHAT?!” the teacher exclaimed in alarm.

   “You know,” explained the boy, “I leaned over and went “Psst!” and it didn’t move.”

 The above amusing dialog is but a precious demonstration of innocence colliding with a point of view expectation.  The joke reminds me over again how easily I can be seduced to embrace the worst of situations; more succinctly, to agree that others are motivated by despicable attributes.  All of that to say I practice assigning others intent.  As sorry as I am to report this on a public forum my possessing such foibles, forever sinking any fledgling hope of being informed I had won an election to a great and powerful position, I remain unabashedly naked in the light of truth.  I jump to conclusions; to the degree I climb into people’s skulls and believe…yes believe I know what they are thinking, feeling, and planning; just like the teacher had with her young protégé.   

Let me also add these are not the mistakes of adolescence, but continue to persist into my elder years; such as they are.  I’ve lost count of how many arguments I’ve been embroiled in based upon perception of what I felt others meant.  In every instance I engaged in emotionally laden combat rather than speak in kinder tones requesting clarification. Time and again in the aftermath, should peace be resorted, and where revisiting what each meant could be discussed without eogic ownership of the sacred position of rightness, it would be revealed once again by a shared, surprised exclamation of

“Oh, I thought you meant…”

    Mistaken assumptions compounded by accusation and insult.  But never mind all of that in its glorious generality, because I’m amused by the continued practice of a quality afterwards that I never get tired of being part of; forgiveness.

   “What doesn’t destroy us makes us stronger” said Fredrick Nietzsche.  In affairs of the heart, that can be doubly applied.  Oh, and isn’t it a really great opportunity to learn to laugh at our imperfections? It’s as if they were always there.  Funny that.