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bloodyrosemccoyLately, I’ve been reassessing my life again, as is the wont of each person from time to time. And while I took an inventory of my head, I found something was missing:
My ON NOTICE board.
Remember the ON NOTICE board? It’s the board Stephen Colbert puts first offenders on. If they are nice they get taken back off of it; if they do not heed the notice and continue to do things he dislikes, he will move them to the DEAD TO ME board.
I like that system. It gave the offenders notice that they had done something wrong, and invited them to correct their behavior if they so chose. It has a philosophy in there that you wouldn’t expect from a character purporting to be a narrow-minded self-serving pundit: second chances.
Lately, though, I haven’t been using my ON NOTICE board. I’ve been skipping directly to DEAD TO ME.
Nobody is very good at giving second chances. We’re not built that way—animals wouldn’t get very far if they didn’t learn the first time around to watch out. Or, sometimes, people will give second, third, fourth, fifth, infinity-plus-one chances when it’s clear it won’t get used for redemption. Keeping it in the middle—judging when to give someone the ability to explain themselves, to correct the problem, or at least to see that it doesn’t happen again, and judging when that’s not going to work—is difficult, and lately I’ve been going with the simple solution of offering no second chances to anyone, including myself.
That’s turned out about as well as you might expect.
I’d forgotten that people can change. I’ve always been careful to make verbal judgments conditional on change—I have always been conscientious about saying things like “I hate it when people cut me off in traffic” or something rather than “I hate people who cut you off in traffic,” because it always seemed rather sweepingly general of me to suggest that this person’s sole attribute on which I should base all judgment of their character from the time of their birth to the time of their death was half a second at rush hour. But I have been ignoring my careful words and hating the people anyway—from the extended family for their transgressions to the world at large.
I don’t like that. I don’t want people to feel that one mistake will make them dead to me. I want them to be able to admit that something they did might have been a mistake without making them think they’re irredeemable. I want to be able to do that myself, actually, to myself. We all make mistakes, and paying lip service to that effect is not enough. I want to really live it.
So I am dusting off the ON NOTICE board. I reserve the right to skip directly to DEAD TO ME for grave mistakes, but for the most part, I want to start using this thing again. It’ll save a lot of time and blood pressure problems further down the road.
My ON NOTICE board.
Remember the ON NOTICE board? It’s the board Stephen Colbert puts first offenders on. If they are nice they get taken back off of it; if they do not heed the notice and continue to do things he dislikes, he will move them to the DEAD TO ME board.
I like that system. It gave the offenders notice that they had done something wrong, and invited them to correct their behavior if they so chose. It has a philosophy in there that you wouldn’t expect from a character purporting to be a narrow-minded self-serving pundit: second chances.
Lately, though, I haven’t been using my ON NOTICE board. I’ve been skipping directly to DEAD TO ME.
Nobody is very good at giving second chances. We’re not built that way—animals wouldn’t get very far if they didn’t learn the first time around to watch out. Or, sometimes, people will give second, third, fourth, fifth, infinity-plus-one chances when it’s clear it won’t get used for redemption. Keeping it in the middle—judging when to give someone the ability to explain themselves, to correct the problem, or at least to see that it doesn’t happen again, and judging when that’s not going to work—is difficult, and lately I’ve been going with the simple solution of offering no second chances to anyone, including myself.
That’s turned out about as well as you might expect.
I’d forgotten that people can change. I’ve always been careful to make verbal judgments conditional on change—I have always been conscientious about saying things like “I hate it when people cut me off in traffic” or something rather than “I hate people who cut you off in traffic,” because it always seemed rather sweepingly general of me to suggest that this person’s sole attribute on which I should base all judgment of their character from the time of their birth to the time of their death was half a second at rush hour. But I have been ignoring my careful words and hating the people anyway—from the extended family for their transgressions to the world at large.
I don’t like that. I don’t want people to feel that one mistake will make them dead to me. I want them to be able to admit that something they did might have been a mistake without making them think they’re irredeemable. I want to be able to do that myself, actually, to myself. We all make mistakes, and paying lip service to that effect is not enough. I want to really live it.
So I am dusting off the ON NOTICE board. I reserve the right to skip directly to DEAD TO ME for grave mistakes, but for the most part, I want to start using this thing again. It’ll save a lot of time and blood pressure problems further down the road.
