That's It. That's All.

I'm convinced that all of the psycho-jabber aside there are more fundamental beginnings to our perspectives and behaviours than we most often attribute. Aside from all of the learning that we do across the span of our lives there are very important foundations that we ignore.  Science can prove a thousand things, and theory can explain a thousand more, but can we really account for the complexity of experience that make us who we are? Can we really get a firm grip on all of that?  Yesterday I heard a psychologist tell a kid that: - 95% of high school romances don't work - we are doomed to parent as we have been parented - that our behaviours don't fall from from the family tree All of which, I am a living, breathing example of the opposite.  I cringed.  How could he generalize, and theorize his way into this child's fragile psyche in such a manner that was so caked in thick bullshit? The thin veneer of comprehension wasn't lost of the girl who quickly dismissed him as a turd. She played his games but only when he left the room did she turn her eyes my way and sigh in disbelief. "Who the #%?! was this guy," she groaned, equal parts exhausted and incredulous. How on earth could he even venture to comprehend her and her struggles. A fifteen year old rape victim, pregnant and homeless, attempting desperately to stay clean despite years of the opposite. How could he comprehend any of it? I mean really comprehend it, not just hitch a ride on theory and the slippery rails of assumption and past experiences that were equally as weakened by cracks as this time. He said to her, "I've been doing this for 34 years and I've seen a thing or two. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about." so you've been raped, I thought. So you've had a strange man's penis in your vagina? A harsh question to pose, sure, but an appropriate query. So you've been pregnant? Nothing to say of homeless and addicted.  You are indeed a fifteen year old female, sir? Of course he's not.   We have no way...no comprehensible way, of knowing what the recipe for another soul might be. So we have one option, support them. And in that brave choice, try to understand, try not to judge, do our best to connect and build something valuable, remember the point of it all...be something they might find hope in. I'm convinced that the is more to the equation that is us...to Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs, to Ruby Payne's Bridges to Understanding Poverty, to a vast array of psychological theory and practice, than what most of us assert. W.H. Auden said it best. We must love one another or perish. We must love one another or perish. Every day I am reminded that I don't know a damn thing, but strangely enough I understand a lot...not because of what I've learned but because of who I am. I hold that truth closely. Someday when I tell my girls what it's like to live, to step away from their parents grasp, and start making a life of their own I want to remind them it's always been their own, and that there is no destination that they'll ever find themselves in. They are only, and only have been been, becoming. That's it. That's all. We don't know anything for sure except that we're all human beings...not mirror images of our parents, not doomed to make the same mistakes, nor destined to fall in line with some random set of statistics...just human, and the complexity of that is incomprehensible.