Lesson #3: Shut Down

When Carlene came up with her life philosophy in a nutshell, "People are different," my first reaction was, "Of course they are; that's obvious."  But many truths that are obvious on the surface are not so obvious underneath.  Maybe it takes a lifetime to totally believe it and accept it.

Gary had a similar life philosophy: "It's a big world...."

Mike calls the two sides of me  Linda #1 and Linda #2--shorthand for his observation that I have two rather different personalities.  (I counter that I probably have a dozen, but I know what he means and maybe I'll write about that in a future post.)

Thoreau said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

Whitman said, "We are multitudes."

All five of these are what chapter 3 is about.  People are different--and it takes wisdom and maturity to allow other people their differences.

It's a big world if we don't limit ourselves to friendships with people who are just like us and who agree with everything we say.

We are even different from ourselves from one situation to another, one age to another; we are not consistently one way all the time. We each have hidden parts--which is what makes our inner worlds interesting enough to keep exploring.

Virginia Woolf believed that to have true humanity as women, we need "a roaming perspective, without flattening it with a demand to speak one thing."

Simons, the author, says, "I range. I don't reveal it all to you because I can't. When I range, I sometimes look two-faced.  The fact is--Virginia at her strongest would admit--not all sides of my head align with yours, and knowing I'm human means allowing some non-communication between us....We operate more like valves than an open book."

"Celebrities like Donald Trump or Bill O'Reilly" appeal to some people because they are loud and seemingly so certain of their single point of view, yet their style is a "denial of diversity of thinking....tyrannical."  It might work for advertising products, but "if we try to rely on fiery self-styling for selling democracy abroad, we've lost our sense of humanity.  Dealing with real concepts like human rights means dropping the strong-arming language of TV or the advertising world to welcome the ambiguous in."

Sometimes, we should all "sit down and shut up." We should "allow our friends privacy to pursue their hidden interests." When a friend seems duplicitous, we should see that she is, rather, complicated--and "no interesting and lasting friend is utterly consistent."

A friend recently related an experience of being in a group of people she thought were friends--only to realize, "They don't even know me."  As she continued to talk about this, she said something brilliant--to this effect:  "But maybe I haven't been honest and told them who I am." Wow!

"Women in Woolf's novels show their grace by holding some things back.  The men in the books like to spout their facts and philosophies like dogma--fire from the gun, shot to awe and impress.  The women know there's stuff they don't know, and stuff that's supposed to go unspoken, at least for a while--for the sake of kindness, depth, or difference."

Life Lesson #3 is harder than it looks: Let people be different; shut down your opinions and judgments and let them be; stay calm when differences show up; and sit with loose ends.