Just a Thought:

How often do you feel like other people oversimplify you in their minds? They don’t understand how complicated your feelings are, your thoughts, your reasons for doing what you do?

Yet how often do we sum up someone else’s actions with a kind of simplistic emotional algebra like, “Oh, he just did x because of y”—where x is something we didn’t like and y is some dastardly but simple and direct motivation or character defect? How often do we dismiss someone with some sweeping mental gesture like “Oh, she’s really just a controlling bitch.”

If we want others to grant us our complexity, shouldn’t we grant them theirs?

Isn’t that kind of a corollary to the golden rule? Think upon others as we would have them think upon us?

“It’s hard to be a human,” my mom used to say. So if we want to be allowed to be fully human, with all our mixed motivations, conflicted feelings and halting thoughts, shouldn’t we let the other flawed and tangled people be fully human too?

Band Name Ideas:*

• Red Phone (with apologies to Justin Romain and Redswitch)
• The Nuclear Footballs

*Band name ideas posted here at LefthandedJeff are fair game. I will probably never start a band. If you like any of the band names I post, help yourself to them. My only request is that you drop me a line at lefthandedjeff@gmail.com or twitter.com/lefthandedjeff and let me know which one you used, and give me a nod in the liner notes on your first CD. Just for the fun of it, just as a courtesy.

Flick of a Question Mark

Before our very eyes, with just a flick of a question mark,
Our sledgehammer pens and piledriver keyboards
Turn to feathered quills and take wing.

Image credit: I found the image above at http://ssbmercurious.mattsoft.net/images/submissions/items/dk3/wingedcloud.jpg