Categories: Yours and Mine

Thinking of Mandela ... A man for whom opportunity arose to take extraordinarily consequential action ... and who took it. When Jonah had the opportunity to bring the Word of God to sinning Nineveh, he hightailed it outa town on the red-eye to Tarshish; it took a Big Fish and the Lesson of the Kikayon (the gourd) to get him back to the action. I suspect when the call comes, most of us turn to Fox or MSNBC or one of the Reality shows where others act and we get to munch on Tortilla Chips. When opportunity called on M'diba to take actions that might break down the artificial categories that separated the various colors of So African folk, he answered the call.

For me, people define themselves by the categories that have meaning for them. Race has never been a category for me, anymore than height. I smile imagining a culture in which people are segregated by their height, especially now as I'm in the shrinking years ... my putative Last Quarter. I can tell the difference between the sexes ... usually. But that, too, doesn't get my category juices flowing ... Y'know ... Us and Them. or ... Us, Them and Those.

Over the past going-on twenty years, I've joined many others in the world in online discussions. I find them enlivening and maddening ... like much of life. Recently, I stumbled upon someone who theoretically differed from me; this is a bunch of folk in the helping professions. (I DO remember an expression from childhood years: Gournichte vil helphen ... ain't nothin' gonna help ... oops). We wrestled about some theory ... Lord! It was fun. He was an older guy like me and, just perhaps, a bit wiser. After maybe 6 or 7 postings, he worried out loud that we might be inducing yawning in the rest of the crew. Frankly, I was sad to leave the play. This guy who lived 5,000 miles away and was in the "the grandkids are gettin' older" years, like I, ... this guy enjoyed playfulness. It was like Summertime (between postings, tho, I was shovelling the walk to my office) in the 1950's and I was out playing catch with my neighbor, Ronnie C.

Then, a Grinch came ... to explain to us that what we had been doing was irrelevant, pedantic, of no value, and argumentative. Why couldn't we be like Rodney King implicitly recommended in his "Why can't we all get along." (Damn! I actually ran a conference titled that ... wondering why practitioners in my own field tended to hate each other). I thought I and my Austrian collocutor were getting along just fine. In fact, I thought we were having a great old time.

OK, OK

I had an "aha! moment." I'm not willing to categorize based on Color or Height and I don't want poor or heavy people restricted to Walmart. I'm willing to talk with Conservatives and Liberals, alike. I think Men and Women both have cool-potential. I live an economically comfortable life but don't see natural boundaries set up with $ figures. I feel like the luckiest kid from Brooklyn ... not the most deserving ... not even more deserving ... but fortunate with a natural amount of willingness-to-work.

But I do see an Us and Them between, on the one hand, those who are willing to play and willing to allow others to play and, on the other hand, spoil-sports and those who when they are not included begin "playing rough."  "Ruff to you," I say! Woof!

So, OK ... I figured myself out. I love to play. With M, with my Kids, with my Grand-kids and with people I've never met who show up in the same cyber-cubicles and with friends and visitors. That's it. I think it was Winnicott who said that Herr Dokteur Freud got it two thirds right in saying that health was the ability "to love and to work" ... he missed, Winnicott opined, "and to play."

I feel better, now. I can go back to bed.  (Actually, it's time to salt the icy office path ... but I'll play, later.)