May 2024
Mine.
“They are mine”, I tell myself regularly.
But are they really?
There’s this dream as kid that when you are an adult you’ll get to have ice cream for dinner every night, stay up as late as you want and do the things you want to do.
Then you grow up and realize that if you thought there were a lot of rules when you were a kid, adulting adds rules upon rules upon rules. And the tricky part is, unlike when you are a kid and the adults tell you “Don’t do this” or “You can’t do that!”, you are not told these rules.
You only find out about them after you’ve made the mistake – hurt the feelings, damaged the relationship, made the wrong choice, etc. Sometimes with pretty disastrous consequences.
After a few of those run-ins (and what adult hasn’t had these), it’s no wonder we all go looking for plans to follow and someone to tell us what to do. Even if we still struggle against rules and know that either we won’t follow them or they might not work for us.
Or we take the option to try to get out of as many rules as we can, being subversive or just in plain denial about the rules and ideas of the groups, societies, governments and culture around us.
But let’s be honest, we have to play by A LOT of rules to live in this world. And opting out can sometimes be just as much work (if not more) than opting in. So even if you are a “rule-breaker”, you are still defined by those rules.
Much has been swirling around me in podcasts, videos and conversations this week (and prior) about the ways we think about things, think about society and think about ourselves. I have been struggling the last few weeks (okay, really my entire life!) about my tendency to compartmentalize my math/science self vs. my humanities/arts self. They are the same self. They actually talk to each other a lot and enjoy each other. They enhance what the other wants.
Yet, we like simple easy binaries – math vs. art, introvert vs. extrovert, morning vs. night, innocent vs. cynical which leads to our favorites in the news at the moment: man vs. woman, race A vs. race B, political party A vs. political party.¦
I’m not one or the other of any of these above. NO ONE IS. While we may lean more one way than the other way at times, it has nothing to do with us. Instead it has to do with these arbitrary rules that some people made back in the day (whoever won that war so there stuff didn’t get destroyed) and continues on. To pretend that any of our societal expectations are based in logic, what’s right, what’s good for us – is deluding ourselves.
We can watch how these rules hurt those around us, hurt our friends and family and even hurt ourselves!
I give myself “rules” for my own life. For what I want to do, how I want to live. They are meant to be empowering but sometimes I find that they take the power out of me. And I have to spend time thinking through, if this is a rule that:
- helps me or hinders me? In the short-term? In the long-term?
- has me playing by others rules, so living in the world (or more likely for me, not playing by the rules because that’s my tendency?)
- Am I okay with my answers to the above?
Because the rules are man-made, by others and by ourselves.
Do what you do but know why you do it (intention matters).
And sometimes know that you just want to do something – without overthinking it – is perfectly okay too. (I tell myself as I’m going through my own rules…)
