Tuesday, December 5, 2017

greying

after watching a preview for an upcoming woody allen film, i overheard my mom say to a friend, '...well, i know this:  people are more than one thing.'  i hadn't heard the whispered comment she was replying to, but i inferred it was a question of her support for the filmmaker, after her expression of interest in the film. 

must be where i learned it, i thought. 

the continuous public exposure of sexual assaults and perpetrators makes it impossible to escape questions such as this.  where do you place these men in your mental sorting exercise?  are they defined by their public contributions to society or their private?  are they only as "good" as their worst deed?  love the sinner, hate the sin?  present tense over past? 

i've been rewatching the whole of game of thrones with luke.  we've nearly completed the episodes aired to date and just last week watched the battle of the bastards (S6,E9).  arguably the best episode of the series, it was awarded the emmy for both writing and directing and has maintained a fan rating of 9.9 on imdb, the top score of any episode, shared with only three others across all seven seasons. 

in a show that's rich with complex plot and multidimensional characters, this episode stands apart in its simplicity.  it pits good versus evil on a literal and figurative battlefield.  the characters each embody polar opposites of the morality spectrum and viewers need assign no asterisk or caveat to their wholehearted support of the hero. 

but that's a television show.  fiction.  brilliantly and beautifully written fiction.  rarely, if ever, is it so simple in reality.

i recently found myself labeled and judged and discretely filed on the basis of a single value i hold.  a single value.  i can hardly even fathom such a decision myself because i so rarely see anyone in black and white.  (and when i do, i tend to embrace both ends of the spectrum passionately and paradoxically.)  by and large, my world is a million shades of grey. 

i am more than one thing. 

and in my experience, like my mother's, i find that all people are.  we are complicated and multidimensional and imperfect.  we are defined by the unique nuance of our shadows, seen and unseen.  black and white doesn't do justice to anyone. 

but does this greying equate to relative morality?  (i can hear that argument already. see? i can argue both sides of most issues, even with myself.)  no, i contend that it does not.  i suggest instead that we consider greying as a deliberate mindset of acceptance, empathy, and forgiveness.

hold strongly to our personal values and, if we must judge, judge each action of ourselves or another as an individual thread of white or black.  then, most importantly, embrace the fabric of one another, each uniquely textured with individual threads of individual values born of our individual life experiences. 

for i am certain, there is not one among us whose fabric isn't grey. 

d:  a soft greying blanket laid across the country
b:  i embrace the thick, grey fabric of you
g:  greying runs in the family