A New Blueprint?

The other day, I heard someone say, “I’m the kind of person who tells it like it is.”

My first thought, when I heard this very confident statement was: Yeah...what do you know? You’re just another idiot like me. You’re treading water. You don’t know what’s underneath it. You can’t know. It’s too big.

If I have matured in no other way, I am at least happy that I no longer take people at their word when they tell me who they are.

There are different ways to learn how to move through the world. Some learn through experimentation, testing boundaries and establishing limits. Some are simply told who they are. I used to look for role models - blueprints that I could follow like a set of instructions for how to live.

This was a doomed experiment from the start, not the least because the people I wanted to emulate were usually not real people, but characters from my books.

Sometimes, I would isolate a quality of a character that I liked and emulate that alone. This, I was convinced, would make me one of the good characters, and therefore successful in my navigation through my own story. Because I read mostly fantasy, to be a good character often meant to be inhumanly intelligent, or chosen by a pre-birth prophecy, or privy to information that “regular people” were not, or in possession of a charmed object that helped one fight off various monsters.

You can see where I ran into problems. But I still do this, to some extent. I’m still impressed by people who never take anything personally, or have seemingly infinite patience, or don’t buckle in the face of controversy.

However, as I got older and my role models started being real people, this tendency to emulate one good quality did not serve me. Maybe someone never takes anything personally because they believe they are perfect the way they are. Infinite patience can indicate low expectations of others’ intelligence. Many don’t buckle in the face of controversy because they thrive on it instead.

I was shown time after time that my life was not being lived within the confines of a book plot. I had to contend with the unpredictable circumstances of a world that didn’t care what qualities I had. I began discovering the faults in most, if not all of the blueprints I attempted to use.

I don’t think that means that role models are useless, but it’s structurally unsound. Watching other people in their completely unique lives, real or imaginary, I attempted to create a blueprint for my own completely unique life. We can’t know what it is to be human without watching others, but watching others can’t completely be applied to one’s life because everyone has different circumstances to react to, and different people around them to show them the world.

We are all building from an unsuitable blueprint. More likely, we’re building from several. There is no good blueprint to follow to the letter. So how do we navigate our lives with only faulty blueprints from which to choose? I don’t have a good answer.

These days, I’m impressed with flexibility, those who don’t take anything anyone says as the complete and utter truth. Those who know it isn’t possible to tell it like it is.

Everyone sees through their own eyes, which act like filters. Filters can leave things out, focus on certain components, and distort the picture in a way that may not feel like distortion. There’s no access to pure, unadulterated truth.

I’m impressed with those who have let go of the idea that they can avoid being wrong. I’m still waiting to see the other side of that quality.

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