Keeping up Appearances:

Keeping up Appearances:
and other silly, human, dances

            When you’re a child you’re always taught ‘play nice’, which is, by itself, a pretty valuable lesson. It’s teaching you to be kind, to share, and to learn how to interact with peers on a respectful and social level. It’s a system of value emplacement that works quite well, for a time. What about when, in those turbulent years, the teaching doesn’t hold up to the indecision of choice? Is it ‘nicer’ to be dishonest to your friend, or to withhold information that would get them in trouble; even if it would help them? Is the ‘nice’ thing to do, to placate those around you with sugar coated words of friendship, simply in the interest of trying to spare their feelings?

            It’s the temperament of kindness with honesty that really seems to befuddle even the most well meaning of adults. We’re all about trying to maintain an image of social consideration – but we’re ready, able, and willing, to undermine it at a moments notice. Being nice is not being two faced; it’s not speaking a mouthful of lies from your mind while everything else pumps out the poison of discontent at a person, place, or thing. Being nice is, in my opinion, about being honest, being real.

            There’s no need to sugar coat your words with everyone, nor is there a need to be hostile in your statements of feelings. You will not like everyone you meet in life. I don’t think you should either. Anyone who likes everyone would strike me as a person who has no defined sense of self, no compass for the basis on which they connect with people, and no landscape by which those they do enjoy can be accurately measured. It’s a harsh judgment, I agree, but I have a habit of not trusting anyone who won’t, or worse cannot, speak their actual mind from time to time.

            Am I advocating a general stance of assholishness? Perhaps I am. The truth isn’t always going to be pleasant, that’s a simple fact of life. What it will always be is true – at least from one perspective. It pays to look at as many facets of a situation as you can, collecting as many raw, chewy, facts as you can, and taking what you see to then form your opinion. Once formed though? It shouldn’t be disguised, or be held to some prescribed theory of impoliteness. It’s just that sort of thinking that leads to an inaction that guarantees no good changes will ever come about.

            It shouldn’t be all about the dance of keeping up appearances, in my opinion. An honest person is not an unkind person – in fact I find them to be just the opposite. Someone who can, and will, speak their honest opinion to you about a situation, is someone more valuable to you than fifty score of your closest Facebook friends; each one ready and willing to jump on whatever bandwagon of attack you set out for yourself, agree with everything you say, and generally pump up an already over inflated sense of self. It’s the people who are unwilling to move to these steps, which by in large, the majority of the world seems to want them to make, that will really stand up for you.

            If you’re right, wrong, sick looking, doing something stupid, being impractical, unrealistic, or just otherwise acting a fool? You won’t always see it. That’s what perspective is all about and why surrounding yourself with nothing but a bunch of snake charmers is not a healthy way to go about existence. You’ll never have the value of real, honest, outside perspective.

            We’re taught to believe, from the very early stages of life, that feelings are too delicate to handle that kind of forward thinking. Do I agree? Somewhat. There are some things; some matters in life that do require a delicate hand, death being somewhere near the top of that list. The problem comes when that sort of mentality is applied to everything. Not every situation warrants that careful kind of maneuvering through the minefields of emotions that makes up each and every one of us. In fact, the only real, way, to have a sense of self improvement, is to have just the opposite done to you.

            But it’s wrong, cruel, and mean, should it come from a peer. If a friend stands up and says: “What you’re doing is foolish, have you even thought about it?” That friend is suddenly suspect – to most people. They’re not standing up for you, they’re not ‘getting your back’, or doing what we’re told a “friend” should do. Friends, as the rule goes, should not question you in such a forward manner, they should never speak their own morals in contradictions to your actions, no matter how considerate it may be. Friends, so society seems to think, should agree with you or shut the hell up.

            That’s why we have Shrinks, after all. They’re the people we pay our hard earned dollars too to tell us everything that we do wrong. They’re effective strangers, educated textbook junkies who think most cases of the human condition can be classified and then given a pill for – and again, I know this is general and doesn’t apply to everything, but it does seem to be the way most people want to go about it. I’ve never understood this kind of thinking at all. It seems so nonsensical to me. Why pay someone who does not walk among the forests of life with you, to comment on the wildlife and tress they’ve never seen? Just because you’ve seen it in a book and read about it, doesn’t make you an expert. People are not textbooks, we don’t all follow the same rules and guidelines (and yes, I know some do, it’s why the exist).

            It’s just that obsession with being liked by everyone, of only telling your dark secrets behind the curtain, to a relative stranger that you pay money to in order to keep their mouth shut, of being afraid to disagree with those you claim friendship toward, and the outright doctrine that honesty should take a backseat to kindness, that are the silliest and most bizarre of social dances to me.

Not everyone in the world will like you and trying to make them is pointless. It’s a twisted, winding, road, that does little more than promise you’ll get lost somewhere along the way. Not everyone will be, or should be your friend. The music’s playing, but you don’t have to dance if you don’t like the song – and being dishonest is the vilest of all the discourteous acts one could drop upon a “friend”. Honesty is paramount to kindness, it’s something owed to everyone around you. It’s the only way people can properly adjust behaviors and patterns, if they want to, or decide that their world is better suited to you not being in it.

Don’t be afraid of who you are, or what you think, just because of how the world might see you. Have your mind and eyes open; and, more importantly, don’t be afraid to use them both in conjunction with your mouth. The world, I promise you, will find a way to build a niche and nest for you without fail. There will be those around you who enjoy the person you are, who respect you for you forward speech, and not all will shun you for your candor.

Take kindness on the principle in which it should apply. Be gracious, be considerate, be thoughtful, and share. That does not mean withhold your words, or try and pass them off in a subtle enough context that you might avoid getting salt in someone’s eye. Be open to your world, and to those around you, be honest with it, them, and yourself. That’s a real act of kindness; otherwise you’re just trying to bullshit your way through an ad-libbed, improvised, play with a bunch of borrowed lines from other poets.

It might work for awhile, but eventually the world will see you for the second rate plagiarist you are and that’s when the real trouble starts.