Read the title of this here post. Humor me... and read it again. Take a moment to think of what the word "product" means to you. Again, please humor me... really think for a moment... I can wait.
Not a single one of you is (or was) thinking the exact same thing as any of the others of you reading this. Not. One. Instead, we use our words and communicate... or at least that's how being a human being is supposed to work, so I've been told.
Today, we can see our government, or at least one ridiculously narcissistic subset of our government, forget the entire point of our government is to communicate... actually exchange ideas and barter a compromise. Again, the point of being human... especially a political one. If you cannot acquire this non-trivial skill, you will fail over and over again. This shutdown has occurred because mistakes have been compounded upon one another. But I digress, kinda...
To draw your attention again to the title of this post, and the connotations you have for the word "product", I would (as usually without a shred of humility) ask you to consider mine...
I could have said "... the sum of our mistakes..." Each mistake, one added atop another, like a pile of rugs just begging for a pea... that pile of rugs is who we are. Okay, but not what I think is true. If we're the product of our mistakes, it confers a responsibility upon each of us to own our mistakes... and learn from them. Mistakes from which we learn naught are doomed to repeat, compounding the initial one. Sound familiar? But... mistakes from which we grow, ideas and realizations that make us grok our inner being just a little bit better? Rather than compounding, your mistakes become fractions of what they would have otherwise been.
All that said, we still make mistakes. Again, that human being thing. Learning from one's mistakes, and owning them, can help us grow. I'd like to think I understood all this before my divorce. May have caught glimpses of the benefit? of making mistakes, but it took something as final as a divorce to really ram the idea home.
My clearest memories, off the top of my head... Dodged phone calls and waiting weeks for responses to emails... Realizing I was tired of being afraid, fortunately in that moment finding myself in the company of beloved family... Trying really hard not to bitch about how long it took to finalize things...
Standing in line in a downtown Los Angeles courthouse building with a stack of forms and a check.
The marriage had been signaled by fanfare, surrounded by scores of family and friends. Here I was standing in line alone... with no clue what came next. How was this not the biggest failure of my entire life?
I'm writing this from the "library" of the home in which I reside with my wife and brother. All that comes with writing that... makes me so happy I'm crying. This amazing life, married to a woman I adore, who is more than I could have ever hoped to have in my life... only happens because I stood in line with a stack of forms and a check.
For the person who's going through their own "divorce"... to you I say: Breathe. In time, you will be sitting in your own version of amazing. And it won't have been possible without living through now. You're already fairly amazing, so it's easy to be confident in this assertion. It's only a matter of how many breaths until you're there. Oh, and come visit.
That is all.
~NCMSW?
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