The Graceful Human

 

If you were alive around the 90’s ( let me not age myself) – chances are you either owned or interacted with an encyclopedia in some shape or form. I remember when I first got a full A-Z version as a gift one year from my parents. A 4-inch thick hardcover beauty with a glossy white cover that I thought was the coolest thing in the world. Anything my 9 year old self could have ever wanted to learn about was in there. I felt so powerful. Along with being immersed in Harry Potter and Nancy Drew books, this was it…or so I thought.

A year or so later came the computer and as we all know, that brought about a whole new depth to learning. My parents got these CD’s of a software called Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, and my mind was blown again. I could tour the Pyramids of Egypt, I could be immersed in foreign cultures, I could learn words from tons of languages – right from my computer chair. And trust me it was way cooler sounding when I was a kid.

The point of this story was that at one point in my life, I felt like I knew, or could know, everything. I felt like there was a cap to knowledge and it could be harnessed by any and everyone that had enough time to do so.

Yes, I obviously was wrong. 

There is no cap to knowledge, and we don’t and will never know everything.

Thankfully I learned this at a young age, and have carried this lesson with me into adulthood. Majority of us probably agree with this statement, but *surprise*, we often forget it. In particular, we forget that other people don’t and will never know everything. 

Let me break it down.

In society, we are constantly forming some variation of professional, romantic, friendly and familial relationships with each other. As we form these relationships we tend to set an expectation of how each other may behave, and by extension, what they will know.

For example, we expect a principal of a school, a parent, a doctor, a coworker, and a friend, to know certain things or behave certain ways. Was this engrained in our brains since childhood? Probably.
And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have expectations of others – because let us face it, sometimes we should. We should be able to have an expectation of people in our government and our social services to act on integrity and fairness. We should be able to trust our family to keep us safe and take care of us as children.  We should be able to trust that our healthcare workers are managing our health the best way they can.

There are so many relationships we can single out and argue that we should have expectations for, but see this is now where you separate it- 

Instead of focusing on the role a person plays, we need to focus on the human being themself.

Humans have feelings, knowledge and identities that extend way beyond their roles in their friendships, families and careers. Unfortunately, we all have a habit of tying people to these roles. We set EXPECTATIONS. We set expectations for the roles of others – and when a person’s actions don’t align with the role they are placed in, we end up passing judgement on their behaviors or actions.

” But isn’t he a doctor?”

“ But isn’t she a mother?”

“ But isn’t he a teacher?”

And so what? 

We have forgotten that beyond a role, therein lies a human. A human with likes, dislikes, needs and wants, regardless of the roles they play. We have forgotten that the role a person plays, does not define the human they are. 

A human is living every day for the first time just like you and I, and we have to allow them to, you guessed it, be HUMAN, and judge them based on that. People can have the most wonderful behaviors, and equally have the most inexcusable. Your responsibility in this world is to navigate relationships based on reality, not what the behaviors should be. 

People do not know everything, and are not perfect no matter what roles they may fill. Friend, pastor, parent, boss, policeman, sister, uncle, coworker, lawyer and beyond. Does this mean we are to set no expectations? No, you just have to set HUMAN expectations. Allow people space to grow, change, learn, pivot and fail. Let them earn your respect, trust and admiration and don’t bestow that based on societal titles. And most of all, what you can do, is to set the expectation of yourself to have love, patience and grace, throughout these ebbs and flows of life.