By Paul V. Montesino, PhD., MBA
The many years I’ve been browsing on this planet of ours have taught me many lessons, some learned in formal schools, others in the informal school of living, each with different values. Recently I’ve heard many debates and lessons about our habitual controversies.
One such lesson has to do with the interpersonal relationships so critical to our survival. Typically, we expect others to be perfect while we ignore our own imperfections. I am no divorce lawyer, but I’m willing to bet that most marriage breakups have to do with the position of one or both parties claiming that the other one has failed their expectations. One’s own contribution to the failure is either ignored or denied. But it’s not only in the marriage that those notions contribute to the end. After all, while many of us are involved in romantic relationships, not all of us tie the legal or religious knot.
We don’t have perfect parents, then we must behave like imperfect children. It’s mom or dad who did it to me, not how I took what they contributed to my life, or how I interpreted it. As for my employer, how can I give it all of my energies and unused creativity if it is such an imperfect employer? As for a religious belief, how can I behave like a perfect believer if my pastors are behaving so imperfectly? How can I accept other faiths if they don’t conform with the tenets or practices of mine? How can I accept the beauty of other races if they don’t look or sound like me? It is up to them to measure to my standards or they are imperfect, while I am not.
We must stop looking at national borders as natural creations; they aren’t. Languages might be sophisticated and educated or not, but their origins are simply tribal products of an evolution that survived on the battlefield and prove our inability or unwillingness to speak a common language. Tribes used to fear each other, fight each other, destroy each other. Our human DNA comes from a single man and a single woman, single not meaning unmarried please!, who lived on this planet more than seventy thousand years ago. That we have evolved into different skin colors, different languages and different nationalities is not our fault, but a characteristic of our migrations at a time when there were no barriers and we were constantly on the go. I am an immigrant, so I must know. I moved as well. I didn’t change colors, but my language now is different and I have an accent to prove it.
Politics has always been one place where we are always perfect in our ideas, while yours are not. There is always a danger with that attitude. A look around the world, sometimes even our own society, and we see a constant battle between different political philosophies seeming to fuel constant different, sometimes even destructive, battles. That many times those battles are dressed in religious beliefs makes not only those causes suspicious but their religions as well. A just God would not want followers to fight each other just to please him, or is it her? My creed, or lack of it, is as imperfect as yours. End of story.
If you and I ever get together and work for a cause, as long as we all agree that we are both imperfect and can work towards less imperfection and not more perfection, chances are that we will succeed. If we continue to expect perfection from each other, failure will be our only reward, capisce? In Ecclesiastes 7:20 it’s been written: “For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.”
And that’s my imperfect point of view today.
