The Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt was:
The Glory of the Ordinary People
Ordinary people or ornery people, Mel asked.
Either way, Cathy responded. Here’s my stream of consciousness….
Years ago, one of my clients, who I proposed coming to work for full time, responded with an affirmative to exploring the concept, despite my orneriness. Ornery. Hmm. I think it was the first time I heard that word. I more or less figured out that it meant all my personal characteristics that people complain about. But maybe I will look it up now, that I am sitting in my writing group meeting.
Well, I would have, but the internet is misbehaving. That forces me to continue with my writing. Am I out of luck exploring ornery? Or should I just continue to mull all my bad habits as known to me? Ornery, critical, a complainer, grouchy, won’t willingly suffer people who don’t treat me the way I want to be treated, self-righteous, according to my ex. I could go on, but you get the gist. Twenty one years ago I had a spiritual awakening, and all those characteristics vanished as I walked about the world. They didn’t totally vanish at home, where the bonds of habit are tighter, but suddenly I smiled my way through work and grocery shopping, and participating in my extra-curricular activities.
My vocabulary too, changed. Was my client’s part really cracked? I couldn’t tell for sure. What I actually saw looked like a shadow. Overwhelmed by a sea of beauty, who was I to pronounce their part cracked, defective, useless for the intended application?
The client, to his credit, a former school teacher, was unimpressed. “It’s cracked,” he said. “Call it a crack.” Well, who was I to pronounce their part cracked? Aaahhh, the specialist in cracks?
The next week, at breakfast after the morning prayer meeting, someone tried to sell me some real estate, and then, when I expressed strong disinterest, a small replica of the Calder Sculpture found in downtown Grand Rapids for $24.00, claiming it was enameled solid gold. It was obvious that the volume and weight of gold would far exceed $24.00 worth. Not to speak of the value of the labor of actually making the piece of jewelry. I told him I didn’t believe him. He agreed to let me test it. I told him it would destroy the piece. He said that was ok. I cut the part and mounted it in hard plastic, polished it to a mirror finish, and put it in a scanning electron microscope, then zapped it with an electron beam, which caused it to emit x-rays. The analytical instrument attached to the microscope informed me that the x-rays in a thin layer under the enamel, which covered a piece of steel, were emitted from gold. In other words, it wasn’t solid gold, but mostly iron and oxygen.
Did he thank me for preventing his further lies to potential buyers? No. When I showed him the data, he simply turned away. Of course he didn’t want this information, that now forced him to confront the fact that he had given false information to all of his previous buyers. I realize now that he was subject to the Belief Perseverance Syndrome. New facts be damned. New facts require work to reroute previously laid down neural routes. Entirely too much work for most of us. Most of us won’t even consciously acknowledge that we should do the work, if we want to act out of the truthfulness that most of us still claim to hold as our highest moral guide.
Truth, it turned out, was really more important to me than cheerfulness. Truth, it turned out, really was more important to me than politeness. Or at least that’s the way it used to feel to me.
There are parts of my life that now are reflected back to me as lies. But I guess that the fact that I allow myself to experience the waves of negative opinion washing over me might eventually lead me forward to a balance more in line with ordinary people, who know the truth that cheerfulness and politeness are more important than truth.
Why are some of us so obsessed with truth anyway? Because our parents beat it into us before we had developed logical analytical skills. Because of course our parents don’t want us holding secrets from them. Our parents are responsible for us. Our parents have millenia of cultural practice working in their favor when they invoke the highest spiritual forces to enforce their demands for truthfulness.
“Did you eat that cookie?”
“Did you brush your teeth?”
“Did you break that glass?”
“Did you just feed that Brussel Sprout to the dog?”
Of course a lie, if discovered, would result in punishment, but even if undiscovered by the parental units, would still be known to the omniscient, omnipotent divine forces, who would eventually pay us back for the sin of lying, even if most of the above-mentioned acts do not usually carry felon status. It’s about the cover-up, the LIE.
Yes, it’s easy in retrospect to see why our ancestors found the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient GOD useful as a method of control for their offspring.
Why do some of us hear this verbal call to truth more clearly than we respond to the lived reverence for cheerfulness and politeness? A mystery. Past lives? Just a result of the variety of temperaments dished out by fate?
For now, orneriness is a blessing, a protection. Cheerfulness be damned.
So many truths. So many insights. Yet unlike the black and white analysts of machines, people are born with interpretative values that shape our thoughts and color our vision thus making truth a very elusive quality. All we can do is strive for the best, most complete truth our brains and senses can assemble while observing that our truth is not necessarily the only truth?! Good luck, my friend!