Lisa for Real

231. Why, Mommy, why?

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Kids have this gift of cutting through the fluff and getting to the most important question their inquiring minds want answered – “Why?” My youngest says “Why, Mommy, why?” in the cutest little voice with a hint of a Chinese accent.

Besides the classic “Why is the sky blue?”, from my family, I have heard…

Why can’t we have pizza for dinner (again)?

Why does that man walk like that?

Why don’t you and Daddy take baths?

And tonight, I heard “Why do male gymnasts wear pants (when female gymnasts don’t)?”

They see patterns and call it out when things don’t make sense to them.

Tonight’s question made me wonder – maybe all the various conversations/protests/changes we are seeing around diversity, equity and justice is because we are finally listening to our kids and not dismissing their questions or just expecting them to adopt the way things have always been. Maybe the reason some “Why’s?” are so hard to respond to is because we don’t like the answer but now they can no longer be ignored. Maybe our “woke” kids are waking us up.

216. Our future depends on it

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As our society becomes more and more polarized, there is a lot more of – if you believe X then you also believe Y, and if that is different than what I believe in, then we can’t be friends. Essentially saying, “You are bad and I am good.” Group think and sticking to the herd becomes as much a social element as a survival mechanism.

Being someone who lives in a world of grey down the middle, it makes me uneasy. The big picture is really important but it’s hard to do so when we’ve been socialized to be reductive particularly in judging people with blanket descriptions like good and bad or by a single decision they have made.

A murderer is not a bad person. They made a bad decision but there is more to them than that one incident. They are not bad.

A mom is not a bad person. They are doing the best with the knowledge and resources they have and some decisions may have been bad, but they are not bad.

A child is not bad. They may make decisions that are inherently bad or that we see as bad because of the way we are socialized but they are not bad.

It is really hard to see the big picture. It takes time to get to know someone, and it takes a lot of brain space and power to gather, consider and compute all of the information about someone. It also takes emotional capacity to be able to have empathy towards others. These are all hard to come by in our modern day culture. It is easier to place people in buckets (we’ve been doing it since toddlerhood) and it is easier to make assumptions (so much less brain power) and to keep things in the binary because it is more soothing to be able to make out a pattern when the world is black and white vs. black, white and infinite shades of gray.

But the future of humanity hinges on this ability to see beyond one quality of someone. One decision, one attribute, one incident – no one thing makes a person. Should bad decisions have consequences? Yes but only if we are also addressing the humanity in the person and the trauma or circumstances that have brought that person to make that choice.

And as always, it comes back to ourselves. Building the emotional capacity for self-empathy, self-love and understanding will allow us to be able to see others with the same. And when we do that, we can live in a world of gray.

192. The ability to translate

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The ability to “see the gray” is the superpower humanity needs to break through the very black-and-white (aka binary) thinking of our world right now. The binary is very obvious in politics but also apparent everywhere else if we look for it. This includes how we approach motherhood and the systems of and anything touched by white supremacy and patriarchy.

Being able to see the gray also requires for us to be able to sit in the gray. One ability that goes hand in hand to cultivate comfort in the in-between is the ability to translate.

The first type of translation that comes to mind is the ability to translate between languages. Phrases, sentence structures, and figures of speech are not a one-to-one translation. Instead, they require the mind to mold and reshape the thought in one language to another in order for it to make sense. That ability to take one language and move words around and reshape them so they are understandable in another is very much work that our brain does in that gray space.

But translation is not limited to languages. Translation also occurs when we try to communicate between forms and bring thoughts to life in other mediums like movement, painting or writing. Art requires for us to feel into the thoughts and emotions and re-form them into expressions through our body/brush/pen. That ability challenges and stretches us to think about things differently.

Where else do you see translation happening?

184. Undermining our human-ness

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In my exploration of worth, I realized I often confused it with deserving.

Deserving is a tit-for-tat mentality – I deserve to get something because of something else I have or do. Sometimes that thing I deserve is a punishment (I deserve a time out because I hit my brother) or it is a prize (I deserve a toy because I cleaned my room). In either case, it is a carrot/stick approach and does not serve us.

In an enlightening conversation with my friend A, I asked them about a seemingly offhand comment I heard that was in the vein of – “I know a lot of Black families. They are all good people.” [original racial group changed] This statement was made in an exchange about racism faced by these marginalized families. Someone pointed out that a statement like that is racist, and I was very confused.

A explained that this statement in this context is racist because it places a justification of the racist acts on the behavior of the Black person (i.e., they don’t deserve these acts of racism because they are good people) when in reality, a person of any race or identification is inherently worthy of respect regardless of their prior actions or any judged or perceived characteristic.

My mind was blown having grown up in a culture where punishment is normal and respect is earned not given. But thinking about it at a very simple level, it makes sense.

Worth speaks to the human-ness in all of us while deserving speaks to the ego. I will choose my human-ness over my ego any day.

156. Collective liberation

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If your liberation is tied to my liberation, then I will be only be free when you are free.

If this is what I believe, then doesn’t everything elevate to a collective model?

Your success should mean my success. And my success yours.

That means I will work to amplify you as much as I would amplify myself because you and I are tied. The intricate collective web that we share is tenuous and only works when we all hold up the strands.