Do you think you are open to new ideas?
I bet you answered yes. Most people think they are. Most of us believe we are flexible, nonjudgmental, open-minded. With good values that we wish everyone else would emulate! I mean, we have to live with ourselves so we create these images of our thought processes that check off all the important qualities. You and me both.
I do think that as you get older (remember, this is a grandmother writing!), you have a choice: either you cement what's already there, or use your newly acquired free time (assuming that you have newly acquired free time) to take a detour or change course altogether. Not on every position for sure. But at least on some. You can be the stubborn old coot -- you're old, you're entitled. Or you can chip away at some of that cement.
It's hard to shake up stuff in your head if you like your life and want to be left alone to do as you have always done. It's a lot easier for people like me who tend to be restless and who like an occasional infusion of the bizarre. (In other words, people who like to travel.)
This is what I thought about while sitting on my Adirondack chair (having chased off the cats who love it as much as I do) on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon on this nearly last day of September. It is truly a splendid day. From the get-go.
(You rarely see pictures of Tuxie; she is very beautiful, very sweet, and very shy. She doesn't make friends easily. She's very different from the rest.)
I'd come across an article in the New Yorker about a film, a documentary, that seeks to challenge the idea that we should treat immigrants as fitting into a binary: family or felons. I was fascinated by this, one, because I am an immigrant and two, because if asked, I'd have probably agreed with the need to create classes of people along some "good" or "bad" axis. Why accept the bad dudes when there are plenty of deserving "good" ones who want to come here, right?
But the article, or rather the film it described, raised questions about this. Here was something to chip away at in my old brain. And suddenly the groceries were melting by the front door and I was ignoring them because my thoughts were spinning back to my daughters' high school years: I had marveled then at how some kids, but not all kids, who did dumb stuff got second chances in life. They escaped quite handily being ruined by their misdeeds.
I also thought about younger girls, say Snowdrop's age, who are very focused on making and keeping friends. Sure, we want to see them develop social skills of a certain acceptable type. Because otherwise, will they be liked? So, yes, on the one hand, we want our kids to be socially skilled and conforming to some model of what we imagine is a good kid. But there's a flip side. And I thought about it the other day as I watched a show on TV. I am a sucker for biographical stuff and so it's no surprise that I like the PBS show "Finding Your Roots." I cannot tell you how many times on that show grown and famous men would talk about how they were misbehaved in school or at home and everyone on the show would laugh and chortle and I got the sense that this was something to be proud of. (I don't mean bringing weapons to school or beating the daylights out of your friend, but small stuff -- the kind that a child might do to test boundaries.) So here we are again, excusing some, but only some, for stuff that we find inexcusable in others.
Beautiful day. Made even better because I had the time to think differently about something, with the help of people who are smart enough to shed new light on old ideas for me.
