Once I had a neighbor who owned not one, but two Great White Pyrenees. Each weighed about 100 pounds, and both could be a little unruly. Out for their daily walk, a passing car (or a passing squirrel, for that matter) could put Larry in real jeopardy: the dogs could almost dislocate his shoulders.
For a while, I judged Larry as wacky; I couldn’t imagine myself enduring his situation. What was wrong with him for God’s sake? Why couldn’t he see the folly of his ways as clearly as I could?
But one good day, I (for some reason) accepted him the way he was. On that day I smiled when I saw the circus, not with scorn but with simple delight in the different-ness of his life; I didn’t judge him or his dogs but appreciated the diversity of it all. I didn’t think that my way (no dogs, or just a little one) was the more sensible way, the better way, or the best way, or the only way. He was he, and I was I, and that was all.
It was the saner way to see.
How we choose our pets isn't very charged. But differences in how people parent their children, choose sexual partners, worship God ‑ these behaviors get closer and closer to my Rules, to areas where I expect uniformities. There ought to be one way, and I want it to be my way!
Releasing such expectations for uniformity is very hard; it feels like you’re making a hole through which your soul may leak out.
It won’t.
There never were, in the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains: the most universal quality is diversity.
Montaigne
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Sigmund Freud
If an aborigine were to draft an IQ test,
all of Western Civilization
would flunk it.
Stanley Marion Garn
How many people must you see every day, thousands? Since most of them have two eyes and two legs, it's easy to assume they’re like you. Secretly, I hope they’re mostly like me and hope I’m mostly like them. But when I’m proven wrong (and it's happening more and more often), it can be — I don't know why — unsettling.