The Briar Philosopher - Consistency

Y’all might have noticed that I’m a little hard to pigeonhole. I’ve never been one to fit too neatly into any category. There are just too many facets of me to put on any one label and have it stick. I’ve even been accused, from time to time, of being inconsistent. I figure the folks who have said that about me were really just complaining because they couldn’t figure me out. I’ve found that some people like to be able to put other people in pigeon holes and don’t like anyone to get outside their own idea of who we’re supposed to be. I guess it makes people easier to deal with if there are no surprises.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, my own favorite philosopher, once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” which I take to mean that being the same all the time just for the sake of being the same all the time really isn’t good for you. It can lead to small-mindedness and tunnel vision.

Now, I don’t believe small-mindedness and close-mindedness are the same thing. Close-mindedness is an attitude some people adopt to keep their own precious ideas from coming into close contact with any other ideas. People close their minds on purpose, I think, and only they can open them. I hear it’s hard to do. Small-mindedness is just a condition caused by the lack of exposure to other ideas, and that lack of exposure can easily be caused by believing that it’s important to be consistent.

We needn’t be.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballerina and an archeologist and a writer and a tap dancer and a doctor. I was told I’d have to pick one. I couldn’t see why and I still can’t. These days I’m a writer mostly, but I still love medicine and dance and I’d pick up a shovel and join in on an archeological dig in a heartbeat if the opportunity presented itself.

I like country music and rock, blues and classical and jazz and bluegrass and gospel. I read mystery novels and history and science fiction and philosophy and science fact and classic literature and poetry and the funny papers. I love a night of good theater when the play is well written and the actors competent and convincing. I also love a down home pickin’ and grinnin’, tater salad and cornbread eatin’, front porch take your shoes off and stay a spell kind of day. I love a good high school basketball game; complete with a hot dog (it would just have to be a turkey dog these days) and a bag of chips as much as I love a well-prepared meal in a fine restaurant. I still wouldn’t pass up a dirt clod war in the middle of a freshly plowed field, nor would I pass up the chance to play a round of golf or two on a sunny afternoon.

I think small-mindedness comes from defining ourselves too narrowly. When someone asks who you are, how do you answer them? Do you tell them where you work or who your parents are or who your children are, or where you live? That’s usually what they mean by the question, but it’s not what I mean when I ask, “Who are you?”

Do you know? Or do we define ourselves just by homes and jobs and parenthood and parentage so much that we’ve forgotten that we are so much more than that? Is that what causes mid-life crisis and empty nest syndrome, and post-retirement depression; that loss of touch with all the other things we are besides the things by which others most define us, the narrow scope of things we’ve learned to see ourselves as being? I think there’s a real possibility that’s the case.

We start learning to narrow our field of vision and imagination at about the age of 4. By the time we reach 40, so many people have told us what we’re supposed to be and do and think and say and like and hate that it’s really hard to remember that once upon a time we knew that our possibilities were endless. We knew that we could be superheroes and cowboys and astronauts and that we could fly if we really put our minds to it.

That was before we were told, in no uncertain terms, that people aren’t purple and ducks aren’t green and you have to color inside the lines and pick one thing to be and you can’t wear your fairy princess costume to school and you can’t eat pot roast for breakfast.

Who says? Everybody says! Well, who is everybody to say? They’re just saying it because it was said to them.

I was once told that after I turned 30 or so I’d have to cut my hair because long hair just doesn’t look right on a woman over thirty. Guess what! I’m 61 and that didn’t happen until I decided it was going to happen. I didn’t cut my hair short until I was 49. My ballerina has long hair, as does my tap dancer and my archeologist and my doctor and definitely my writer. That was always part of who I saw myself as being. When it changed, it was because it changed inside of me, not outside. And if it changes back, that will also be because how I see myself changes, not because someone looked at me with judgment.

Just for a minute and just for the fun of it, think back, call up that four-year-old you used to be and ask him or her, “Who are you? What do you want to do? To try? To be? To eat? To see?” Who knows what you might discover? The answers might not be consistent, but there’s a good chance they’ll be more interesting than some of the answers you’ve heard from yourself lately. Maybe you’ll pick up the coloring book of your tomorrows and discover that it's OK if people are purple and ducks are green and that the world won’t fall apart if every now and then you color outside the lines.