strike that

Everyone is doing what they need to do to get by.

I say it to myself on the highway on Friday afternoons, speeding home to Portland after a day of teaching, while SUVs rocket past me and crouching sports cars cut me off. I stay to the right except to pass, and when angry determined drivers glare through their windows into mine I look straight ahead and sing a little louder. They are doing what they need to do to get home, I tell myself. They have had worse days than mine.

I say it to myself in the coffee shop when my occasional fumbling is met with an icy stare, and when my customers order with irritation and pocket their fifteen cents change. Not everyone knows how tricky this cash register can be. Not everyone thinks fifteen cents is worth dropping in a tip jar. Some people need every fifteen cents accounted for, and I’m lucky not to be one of them. They are doing what they need to do.

Sometimes when I get to peer into other people’s heads, and to hear the way the internal logic gets translated into words and actions, I am amazed. I am amazed any of us manage to communicate with each other at all. It is a glorious and unlikely thing, and it is unsurprisingly riddled with error.

Everyone is doing what they need to do, I tell myself, when I try to untangle why my friend’s girlfriend treated him so unkindly, and why my other friend’s husband seems so thoughtless, and why so many of the guys I have cared about recently leave me feeling bad about myself. I don’t think it’s what any of them set out to do. And that doesn’t excuse it, because despite hearing many arguments to the contrary I believe we are each responsible for the ways we make other people feel. But the accountability ball gets dropped all the time. And at these times, while I am wishing that we could all be a bit more responsible with each other, I am also trying to remind myself. We are all doing what we need to do.

posted by tortaluga @ 8:58 PM