December 3, 2012

  • Post-birthday thoughts.

    When you were younger, everything was simple. The good guys wore white, the bad guys wore black. You could clearly place people into “good” and “bad” categories- people who were good did no wrong in your eyes, and people who were bad had no redeeming qualities to them whatsoever. And all you had to do when you met someone new was ask them if they wanted to be friends- BEST friends even- and a resounding yes meant you were on your merry way to actually becoming those best friends.

    When you get older, things get less clear cut. You’ve had enough life experiences to learn that not everyone is absolutely good and not everyone is absolutely bad, though you still want to categorize them as such. You filter and dwindle down the groups of people you can trust and jettison those you don’t. You like to think you’ve narrowed it down to a group of good, honest folks- you’ve done away with those who are selfish, flaky, arrogant, deceitful and cheap and are left with the warm, the generous, the inspiring, the reliable. In doing so, it still all boils down into you categorizing people into “good” and “bad” groups.

    Yet the lines become blurred often- some people are good to others, maybe not to you. Maybe they cheat on their significant others, but they treat you just fine. But social groups entwine people together to make you interact with everyone whether you want to or not. And so rather than think of someone as only “bad”, you kind of weigh their black with their white and decide if they’re someone you want to keep in your life. And thus, everyone is really just different gradations of grey, and figuring out how much grey you can tolerate/overlook becomes the deciding line in some cases.

    Obviously you want to think highly of the people you keep in your life, and it’s always disappointing when your expectations of their character that you thought so highly of does not hold up. And we ourselves are not truly white either. Everyone has their own selfish choices they make- you may be the judgy asshole to someone just as someone else is equally an asshole to you. It’s just a matter of balancing how much effort you want to put into others versus how much you want for yourself.

    But I still haven’t lost that glimmering, slightly fading feeling of when we were younger- many times when I meet someone new, they’re still that untarnished white. They could be a potential new good friend and I’ll get excited to get to know them, which my friends jokingly have said that I “love too hard”. But then again, I have been extremely fortunate in my life to meet those who are just plain good people who make you happy to be around them. There are people in my life I know and have known for years, and even though I’ve seen them hundreds of times, they can still brighten up the room when they walk through the door. The way you see some people, their light never quite fades, and these are the people who bring others up with them.

    May you yourself unknowingly be the light that brightens up a room of people, and may you be surrounded by the same.