People Behaving Badly

making peace with our own bad behavior

I have never felt entirely comfortable with the quote often attributed to Anne Lamott that goes something like “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” I don’t deny that we own everything that has happened to us or that we should tell our stories or even that people everywhere will want us to write warmly about them; it is the last clause that hangs me up: people should have behaved better.

Well, yes, shouldn’t we all?

But the truth is almost always we all wish we would have behaved better ourselves. There’s hardly one situation in my life that I know I handled perfectly. Regret tinges the edges of almost everything. I don’t carry around the regrets like a lumpy burden on my back, replaying and regurgitating everything he said and she said and I said and did. But I can’t deny the regrets are there.

I wish I’d vetted that one roommate more carefully. I wish I’d not left that one space so quickly. I wish I’d had that last conversation with a boyfriend and in another last conversation with another boyfriend, I wish I hadn’t said that thing I did. I wish I’d seen how my proximity to power—even though I held none of the power myself—gave me an appearance of power. I wish I’d not committed to leading this thing or that thing or committed to following the other thing. I wish I’d been a little less hard on that one friend and a little more honest with this other friend. I wish I’d tried harder to see this one situation from their perspective, and to be honest, I wish I hadn’t delayed doing the right thing for so long because I was trying so hard to see another situation from their perspective. I wish I’d reached out for “the other side” before becoming obligated and loyal to one side. I wish I’d been able to see how hard this one person was doing to escape the clutches of authoritarianism and not just how I felt abandoned and hurt in their clumsy process.

Regret tinges the edges, see? And we can’t help but participate in ten-thousand things that we wish we could do over. That’s just life. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said something like, “Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards,” and ain’t that the truth? The less philosophic have said, “Hindsight is 20/20,” and I can’t help but agree.

I rather prefer Marion Roach Smith’s quote on telling our stories, “While all of those experiences I chronicled are true, not one of them is the whole truth. Going for the whole truth is a fool’s errand.” That’s self-awareness.

Levi Yaggy, Geological Chart

My oldest and dearest friend just left after a week here. We put together puzzles and climbed to the top of waterfalls and ate finger-licking good food that we ordered or made from scratch. We spent a day at a nearby spa celebrating a milestone together and we planted a tree. But mostly we talked. She is the only person in my life apart from Nate who knows it all, the deep and dark and the light and bright. I am not a verbal processor and find it difficult to talk for talking’s sake, but with her I am splayed open, revealed and rebuked and reformed and re-membered.

We talked about truth a lot this week, whose truth is truest and how we can be sure. We spoke about theology and our bodies and our hopes and our friendships with others and my marriage and her singleness, every subject threaded through with what is true, but also with the awareness that none of it was the whole truth because, as Smith said, that’s a fool’s errand. We recognize the foolishness of assuming we alone are right and our perspective is the most clear-sighted and unadulterated and objective truth about any situation. We find it—dare I say?—even easy to hold the space between perspectives for one another. Partially I’m sure that’s because we’ve been agreeing and disagreeing for nearly thirty years of our lives, but I think it’s more because we have simply learned to make space for the soft and supple hands needed for our formation. We both want only the best for one another, even if it hurts a bit to get there.

This morning she sent me this clip of an art installation by Troika and I watched it again and again, trying to understand the mechanics of it, until ultimately deciding that, like most truth—and especially the whole truth—it cannot be fully understood with our minds but must be experienced with our whole selves.

Christians on the right and the left and their culture warriors might reject this, armed with their litany of incontrovertible truths, but I remember Jesus saying, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and here is where I have staked my flag. As clear as some believe the Bible is about whatever their pet doctrine or belief, the clearest of everything is Jesus, only Jesus. And Jesus himself was no consistent arbiter of one-way or another on most things. He flipped a table in the temple and suffered the little children to come to him. He spoke to crowds of thousands and begged for a little time to withdraw. He wept when his friend died and questioned the weeping of another when their friend died. Jesus wasn’t on a fool’s errand, to be a good teacher or great prophet or kind friend or gentle leader, his errand was clear and to the point: God become man to live among us and make a way for us to be re-membered with God. That’s it. He had his eyes on one prize: that we would all be unified in the family of God and with God.

I don’t know about you, but that has been making a lot of things in my life more simple these days. I wrote yesterday that the richer my interior life becomes, the more simple my exterior life becomes. I have learned (and am still learning!) to sit with complexity and find a home in paradox. I have learned and am still learning that all of us are mostly trying to find the best way to do the things we think we’re called to do—even if we’re failing forward at it. I know I am. And I know I still will. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with those who keep on failing to do the right thing or approve of actions that harm others. In fact, by holding space for complexity in my heart, I am able to condemn the action or issue, while still holding a lot of love in my heart for the individual. I didn’t used to be able to do this and the more I live, the more I want to learn to do it well.

I hope if you’ve made it this far in this piece, you’re learning to do the same: to tell the truth with the full acknowledgement that it’s never hardly ever the whole truth, but just the truth as best as you can remember it or as best as you can tell it today or even sometimes the truth as you wish it was, tinged with hope and love and endurance and all the things we all wish for our lives. I think sometimes that’s okay too.

Here’s two more from the art installation above. I love them all and these other two helped me understand bit more the mechanics of the illusion.

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