All My Life

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It is something all teachers eventually encounter. You are telling a student that you don’t write an academic essay in the first person. Or that you need to provide references for those “Obama Was Born in Nigeria, Trump is an ISIS Agent, Hillary Ran a Child Porn Ring Out of a Pizza Parlor in New Jersey, Putin is a Robot” stories. The standard response can spring from any number of classroom situations, but eventually this surfaces: “But I’ve done it this way all my life.”

They are truly unaware of the irony, that “all their life” from a “big picture, student in the real world perspective” is maybe 6 or 7 years. But you don’t hassle them about that, you just point out that there rules and conventions in academic writing that allow us to be sure that we are all speaking the same “language.”

It is a completely different dynamic when each person at the dinner table is looking back at an “all my life” of 50, 60, 70, even 80 or more years. Again the response can be motivated by any number of discussions, from the proper way to mix the salad dressing, to intricate issues of public policy, through the “do’s and don’ts” of child rearing. It is nonetheless the same response delivered with the same certainty as that of the college sophomore: I have done it this way all my life.

“All my life” is an incredibly powerful piece of evidence for each of us. It is the natural outgrowth of the notion that “experience is the best teacher.” The problem is that for both the college sophomore and life’s seniors “all my life” is utterly unique, as is the “truth” it seems to reflect. 

The problem, of course, is that my “truth” gained over the experiences of “all my life” is potentially “true” only for me. For example, somewhere back in my life I apparently had a bad experience with vinegar. Hence, I have not liked vinegar “all my life.” This “truth” expanded, perhaps purely rhetorically, to all things “vinegarish,” like “vinaigrette.” When it came to salad dressing, I was a Ranch or Caesar man. Had been “all my life.” Imagine my amazement when sitting in the Bacchanalia Italian Restaurant the other night here in Chicago, I filched a forkful of salad from my wife’s plate:

“Wow. That’s really good. What kind of dressing is that?”

“It’s really great isn’t it? It’s the house vinaigrette.”

An obvious lie. I don’t like vinaigrette. I haven’t liked it “all my life.”

So what lingering notions did I pack into my doggy bag along with my left over lasagna? (That is just a figure of speech. Vito, the big black dog, ain’t gettin’ none of this lasagna.) A few come to mind:

Experience is a wonderful teacher. It’s the whole “nothing teaches you not to touch a hot stove better than touching a hot stove” idea. But it is not always a totally reliable teacher. Somewhere back in my life, experience had taught me that I did not vinegar. As I said, I then expanded that to all things that sounded like vinegar. Hence, I came to pre-judge all things in that culinary-rhetorical category. Pull out the hyphen and we are right there cheek to jowl with prejudice.

That little exercise shows us that while the experiences of “all our life” can keep us from burning our fingers on the stove, it can also lure us down the slippery slope of becoming mindless vinegar haters.

So, how do we guard against being deceived by the seemingly solid evidence that we have gathered and lived by “all my life?” You will not be surprised by the notion that I look to the tenets of Distilled Harmony for guidance.

First, delightfully, “all my life” is still unfolding. This means that none of my experiential assumptions should have morphed into certainty. And that, of course, is the mistake made by both the college sophomore and life’s seniors; the notion that the repeated implications of life’s experiences have led to certainty. My pre-judgements accurate. All vinegar is bad. I possess truth.

On the other side of the ledger we encounter that the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony is “foster harmony.”  Insisting on the veracity of the prejudices you have clung to “all my life” is the antithesis of fostering harmony. This does not mean that you necessarily acquiesce to the “all my life” verities of others, but it does require us to at least consider the notion that our own “almost certainties” still have room for amendments.

The challenge then is to persuade those involved in the dialogue - be they students or guests around the dining room table - to move along through the other tenets of Distilled Harmony: Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.

Give it a try. It sometimes works. Trust me on this. I have been doing it for several years of the last couple decades of all of my life. 

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