Respectable All Around
In order to find myself surrounded by people I find respectable, I needed to learn to only relate with people I find respectable.
It's easy, with the current protection-oriented themes in relating, to think this means "stop relating with people you don't find respectable." And of course, this is part of it, but there are other more important parts.
Of chief importance is the part where I needed to LEARN to relate with people I find respectable. Their ways were not the ways I learned as a child. The ways I learned were violations of their ways, innocent, to be sure, but also dissonant to their cultures of relating.
What is it normal to say when someone makes a mistake? How much can I tell you about what I see in you, and how? How do we talk about the others when they are not around?
The ones I found most respectable had unexpected answers to questions such as these, and until then I hadn't seen them as questions. These are unspoken elements of culture, and we learn a VERY specific "normal" way of being. It would be hard to describe our own normal to someone from outside our very specific normal, but the differences would be clear in 24 hours of sharing space.
Also of importance here is that I needed to learn to relate as if I find EVERYONE respectable, because it is the best way I have personally found of being in the world. The way a hose is only full of water when it is spraying water, giving respect into the world, treating every person as a respectable individual, fills me with love and respect. It is what I want to be full of, it is the style of relationship which I desire to bring to the world.
I remember that respectability has a lot to do with my preferences, and these are sacred and meaningless—sacred to me and my experience, meaningless to others and the world, they do not mean anything about anything. I know respectability is a law, not a set of rules, and I seek integrity where it is, rather than seeing if it's somewhere I decided it should be. I respect integrity, and integrity in a being is not a specification but a structure which is within its own specification.
A feather has as much integrity as a chair. A feather has the integrity of a feather, a structure meant to dance with air. A chair has the integrity of a chair, a structure meant to hold a person, or maybe even three people, or also not one, if that one is too heavy for that particular chair. A feather does not have the integrity of a chair, as any would find if he were to try to sit on it. And the chair might still be a chair of integrity, even if it collapses when you in particular sit upon it.
I learned to relate only with people I find respectable, and I learned to find what is respectable in every person, and to relate with only that.
What I've discovered in the process of learning to relate only with those I find most respectable in the world is the ability to play with my own lenses. With clear sight, every person has the integrity of that particular person. Your uncle the drunk is reliable, in his own way, in that "one beer, home by 11" means his friends will pour him on the porch at 3 am. And he's living exactly the perfect life for him! Talk about community!
There is no right way to live. There is nothing normal. We are animals like any others, fooling around until we die. We have time to kill before time kills us. All language is inference—is an obvious lie truly a lie? Am I not the ultimate liar, if I invest my belief in an obvious lie?
We are certainly dying. Are we living? Are we really appreciating, finding value in, the way others are living, the unique art of it?
When I have trouble finding the respectability of any particular individual, I remember a prayer, "there, but for the grace of god, go I."
Deeply and truly, that is who I would be if I were that person, and that person is living a sacred experience on my behalf, that I might live exactly this one. I would always rather be me than them, and I can always be grateful that they are being them so I don't have to.
