Categories
and Labels
We
humans like to place people in neat categories. We believe that once
we get an individual squarely into their category, we know the
essence of them and it will not change. I don't think we do this
because we are malicious, or have ill will toward another, but simply
because it helps us to feel we have them pegged. We know who
they are.
Remember
when we were ten years old and made a butterfly collection for our
science fair project? I do. We caught a butterfly and put it into a
canning jar with a cotton ball soaked in ethyl alcohol. Once it was
“good and dead” we stuck a couple of straight pins through it and
pinned it to a board—hopefully with its wings spread so we didn't
have to spoil them by forcing them open. Then we looked them up in
the encyclopedia and made a label to stick underneath. The one who
caught, pinned and labeled the most different species of butterflies won the
blue ribbon. It was rather barbaric, actually. The pinned butterfly
was nothing more than a good specimen, a point in time. It captured
neither the caterpillar, nor the chrysalis, nor the transformation in
between.
That's
what our labels do. They pin the person to a category, at a point in
time. They do not take into account what that person experienced in
life to bring them to this moment, nor do they capture what changes
may take place in future. Rainier Maria Rilke expressed it this way:
“A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had
with them—they are who they've been throughout your whole
relationship.” If everyone we met hung their label on us, and we
hung ours on them, we'd all be on our knees from the sheer weight of
labels. Best not to hang them in the first place.
Today,
let's practice abstinence from labeling (and leave the poor butterflies alone). We all need to lose that
weight.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment