Ever Growing Ever Changing

Aging, when viewed with a discerning eye, can provide some profound lessons. Life’s a rough teacher, but it’s a good one. You tend to build resilience not from reading about it, but from the storms you’ve personally weathered. Your self-confidence has been forged in fire, and you have developed a new-found appreciation for what truly matters. In the next series of posts, I want to muse about five lessons I have learned from my just over 40 years of existence, as a Christian, Jamaican, and Black woman, starting with the complexity of human nature.

We like to fit other people into neat little categories, which I suppose, helps us to simplify a very complex world, easily draw conclusions, and quickly make decisions.  Unfortunately for us, life is a lot more nuanced than our simplistic labels. People are a mix of good and bad, light and darkness, capable of both great kindness and profound cruelty.  That is also true for collectivities such as racial, ethnic, and national groups.

Emotions often cloud our judgment, leading us to perceive those we dislike or who are unlike us as irredeemably evil. These emotions also blind us to the darkness in ourselves, those we love, and those like us. The Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonisation of Africa and the Americas have left a bitter legacy, leading some of my Black friends, for example,  to express distrust of all White people. Yet living in Jamaica, I cannot disregard the brutal Black-initiated crime. All over the world, all races and ethnic groups have shown themselves to be capable of inordinate evil.  At the same time, within these same groups there is great generosity and charity. We see stories of heroes of all hues all the time, and I have personally experienced said generosity from people all over the world, from South America to Europe, and from Asia to Africa.  

Returning to the individual level, I would like to think there are more “good” people than “bad” people out there, “good’’ being understood as those who generally choose to suppress their darker impulses in favour of compassion and kindness. With that in mind, I want to share a lesson about human nature entrusted to me by a former employer. She said it was important to not be so focused on the bad in people that we miss the good. For some reason, her statement struck me because at that time, my relative immaturity as a human being had prevented me from fully appreciating that life was not just black or white.

It is a lesson that still resonates very strongly with me and a reminder in those moments when I find myself exasperated with friends, family members, or acquaintances. It is a lesson that the world would also be well minded to heed because unfortunately, cynicism is at an all-time high and we now seem to be infected by a particularly virulent strain of the “people are hard to love, forget them and let me get a cat” syndrome.

Yes, people are indeed hard to love. So are you. Do you really think everyone else is the problem all the time? For every complaint I have about someone, they probably have a complaint about me. If you think about it though, Jesus Christ, the epitome of perfection, was willing to die for humanity, as totally unhinged and imperfect as we are. Yet here we are: quick to discard people because of a slight offense or because they have the audacity to not live their lives or see the world the way we believe they ought to.

In general, relationships with people are worth taking a risk for. Sure, some will break your heart, but some will also help you heal and give you your best memories. That is the paradox of humanity. Self-preservation only preserves your loneliness. By acknowledging this duality in human beings and in ourselves, we might learn to cultivate a more compassionate and understanding society, as well as more fulfilling and resilient relationships.

Share your thoughts below, including on your key life lessons learnt to date.