SteveCuno.com
  • Home
  • Books, Articles, and More
  • Cunoblog
  • Contact / Discuss a project

Because and despite

2/26/2022

0 Comments

 
“All friendships are ultimately inexplicable, although some of them are harder to figure than others.” —from A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block

Picture
TWICE IN my life, a father figure showed up when I desperately needed one.

Later, I would learn that each man was guilty of something egregious.

With apologies to your curiosity, I shall not provide details. They would only get us off-track. Suffice it to say that the revelations knocked me for a loop.

An inner voice told me to hate them, to have nothing further to do with them. Yet I couldn’t. The kindness, validation, and support each had shown me was still there. Certainly the good did not erase the bad; but, at least for me, neither did the bad wipe out the good.

“Good person” versus “bad person” is a false dichotomy. Human character comprises many parts, each landing somewhere along its own acceptability continuum.* Some people land consistently near either extreme, but most — including you and me — land in different places on different continua.

Consciously or not, we average the continua, and choose to write off some people and not others.

Some of my friends hold views that I find odious. It’s a charge falling well short of “guilty of something egregious,” yet sometimes someone will ask how I can be friends with “a person like that.”

We love not just because but also despite.

* When you find yourself unable to make a decision, you are experiencing different aspects of yourself at war with one another. That’s an admitted oversimplification. For more information, I commend you to neuroscientist David Eagleman’s excellent book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Welcome to Cunoblog

    ... where I share thoughts about writing. ​I don’t consider myself a writing authority, but that doesn’t keep me from presuming to blog like one. Oh, and I reserve the right to digress when I feel like it.

    Archives

    December 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    September 2021
    June 2021
    March 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

This site and all items herein © 2023 Steve Cuno
  • Home
  • Books, Articles, and More
  • Cunoblog
  • Contact / Discuss a project