A brief philosophical flirtation with relativity...sort of...
This posting is not a rant, in fact, I don’t care whether you read it and if you do, I don’t care if you agree with me or not. Sorta. Actually I hope you DO read it and agree with me, but if you don’t we’ll sort all that out some other day.
That said: as I age, something I notice more and more, not ALWAYS, but much more often, is that one thing is everything.
We rarely see people doing fabulously in one part of life, or horribly, and find everything in antithesis to that in every other part of their lives.
I know that there are episodes of Hoarders on TV which show normal/healthy looking folks, maybe a smidge overweight, perhaps a tiny bit unkempt, who, only as you follow them through their front door do you realize that they live in mountains of dead animals, and animal feces and old newspapers, and candy bar wrappers, and used paper plates from their kid’s birthday party 17 years ago all carefully scattered EVERYWHERE in their domicile —
But far more often, these people on these charming reality TV shows look, pretty much exactly like you’d expect someone living that out of control to look; wild crazy hair and eyes and filthy clothes and bad teeth and 8 inch long disgusting fingernails, their piss saved in cardboard milk cartons, and shit like that.
Ted Bundy was partly so enigmatic and confusing because looking at him, you saw a handsome guy, a little on the conservative side, but with a great smile, clean teeth and fashionable clothing, turtleneck sweaters like he was running as a Young Republican for a seat on the School board.
The kind of guy most sane people want to hang-out with and it seemed impossible that he could be the excitable lad who kidnapped, tortured, & murdered young women then went back and had sex with their corpses for days or weeks afterwards.
These exceptions, Bundy and the hoarders, don’t prove the rule, but your ability to agree with or even simply understand my central premise, confirms my theory; that it’s always a surprise to find a crack-smoking, alcoholic, morbidly obese person or any other type of OCD lunatic, doing a bang-up job with their personal finances.
This is because often (not always, but often) once you learn to take care of one thing well, simply by paying attention and doing it right, often all or at least most everything else falls into place too —
This posting is not a rant and I don’t care whether you do one thing right or not. After all, it’s your life.
Sort of...
Image courtesy of Denny Muller, Unsplash