Bumbling Toward Being A Better Man
I stumbled on some super powers in things I'd once clocked as Kryptonite
As I was leaving the Sunday service this morning, this thought occurred to me:
I only began to become a better man once I paid heed to my daughter's takes on what it means to be a better man.
As true as this is - it could stand alone as a post afaic - I’m not one to suffer pithiness gladly. I can’t leave it at that.
It is my journey to this revelation that’s worth exploring and possibly worth sharing here for its relevance to more than those people who look very much like and were raised very much like myself.
I am not sure what train of thought left the station to arrive at that observation today. It was more likely an intermodal voyage involving a train, a hot air balloon, an overloaded container ship, and a meandering foot path.
Part of it may be the versions of manliness being discussed relative to current events - none of which are even tangential to what I identify with.
This thought may have been lifted up from the contributions of children to today's church service and how they were received by the congregation as instructive and not as cute or infantile.
It's not as though our physical journey from our home of 30 years to a new and unfamiliar city has been divorced from a long journey of introspection as to both how I arrived at this new place, and how I did as a much different person from the one who started out, unaware there was a journey. In making this move to Louisville I resolved - openly to close friends - to be intentional about the ways and whys someone like myself can move freely in unfamiliar surroundings and I can't deny that resolution's contribution here.
It could be an offshoot - a spur in the parlance of a railroader - of the ways I've lately been mentally cataloguing how expertise and wisdom tend to have their wellsprings in unexpected (or at least non-traditionally grounded) sources. (Think of it being the diner, not the chef coming from a culinary institute, knowing best what tastes great; or the pilot in a disabled plane, not the air traffic controller, knowing which runway to use; or the impoverished people, not the economists, knowing what they need to thrive.)
However it is I arrived at my conclusion, I cannot say. It just feels inevitable. And as I trace back how I got here, I think I stumbled on some lessons that have utility to other people.
I hope my Sunday observation has relevance to you, not so you can become a "better man" - whatever that means - but perhaps…
...so you can practice the kind of humility it still takes for me to illuminate the wisdom that's abundant in unexpected places.
...so that you can take solace in knowing that the process of self-liberation - a process that for me has entailed the searing pain of mentally rewiring and of violently tearing myself away from my own baked-in conventions - is well worth it.
...so you can extend yourself a large serving of grace as you reflect back on where you once were and where you are now, in the larger context of appreciating where you are headed.
...so you don't make my mistake of delaying your own travels by looking to the many false prophets that contemporary society, popular culture, and the relentless press for identity normativity have propped up to send you on pointless errands, indulgent frolics and destructive detours.
...so you can receive what hits hard like harsh criticism as the kindnesses they, in fact, are - and that you have the capacity to distinguish which sources of criticism are delivering kindnesses and which are not. Tied up in this thought is my wish for you to not be so cruel to friends, as I have been, in forcing those bearing kindnesses to be persistent and dogged just to be heard.
...so you, too, can appreciate, on a mystical scale, the awe and wonder of how the world - and its people - connive to operate in surprising ways, even when it all seems like routine or drudgery or worse.
...or - if this must be about manliness or masculinity - then I share it here so you might see how feminism and manliness - by my reckoning at least - need not be incompatible or in tension. One is not a yin to the other’s yang. There’s no Venus versus Mars.
When I hear sweeping laments of the way men, in general, behave badly - in ways that are revolting and persistent - I try to listen for ways to personally do better. I know I need to listen most closely to those observations that sting, because that stinging sensation is my soul confessing to my complicity.
Rather than saying "not all men," I have to decide whether I have what it takes to accept the assignment I'm being given and act so that it's "one less man."
I do not harbor anger toward the observer as I do not aspire to be nor do I self-identify with the kind of man who is being lamented.
If I must harbor anger in reaction to these generalities being expressed by someone who knows harm from life experience, my anger is pointed at those men whose behaviors lend truth to brutal observations that don't come from nothing, nobody and nowhere.
Lastly, if I may return again to uncoupling this piece from being confined to masculinity, these lessons I am learning seem to be equally beneficial to all of the myriad dimensions of privilege and power that I have long lived with and have accepted with widely varying degrees of competence.
I hope that whoever you are and however you identify yourself and whichever - if any - privileges you’ve taken on, there was something in this reflection for you, even if it is nothing more than the hope that the truths you’ve shared as kindnesses may be seeds that are well-sown which might yet bear fruit, even if it must come in another season.