Savoring the Incompatibility

18Apr08

I have always been a fan of Sesame Street, especially Ernie and Bert. Lately I was watching some of my old favorite skits and this one grabbed my attention. I’ve been thinking about accepting differences in other people without attaching negative stigmas to them.

How easy would it be for Ernie and Bert to use their differences as the basis for contempt? Our differences, which are often charming at first, become the basis of judgment and blame over time as they exert greater influence on our own preferences. Ernie could think of Bert as a stick-in-the-mud because Bert thinks it is important to be neat, quiet, calm and unperturbed. Bert could pressure Ernie to change who he is because he is often noisy, messy, silly, rambunctious, and sometimes annoying (to Bert anyway).

With differences like these, it is so easy for any one of us to lose sight of what we ever loved in a person. Real life requires mental discipline in the way we think about each other and in the way we represent what is good about ourselves. What we bring to the relationship is usually not better or worse than what the other person brings; we are just different.

One person often takes risk for adventure and the other spends more energy on precautions. One person sees the possibilities, the other sees the obstacles. We can allow resentment to grow when we try to change the people around us, and we can also allow resentment to take over when we try to constantly change FOR the people around us. The more we try to force ourselves to be what the other person wants, the more we run the risk of resenting them.

Someone (I forgot who…sorry!) once told me this: when we think we are all in the same boat, we start fighting for who is going to drive the ship. But the truth is, we are all in our own separate boat, we are just going down the same river. We do not have to struggle to stay in synch all the time, and many times we will get along better if we loosen the chords that bind us and learn to get more comfortable with greater freedom in our relationships. This means we learn to tolerate those differences, adjust our own preferences at times, and accept that we are not the same person.

“You are messy, really messy, but I don’t mind if you are messy, that’s what friends are for.” Okay, sometimes I DO mind it when others are messy, and often I’m the messy one, but we are learning to make room for differences and be more cheerful about it.

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