Installment # 61

If we recall Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which I think is still taught in high school, they can be succinctly listed as the progression: Physiological (air, food, water, clothing and shelter), Safety (personal security, financial security, health, etc) Love and Belongingness (family and friends), Esteem (self-esteem, self-respect, etc), and Self-Actualization (being the best version of yourself that you can be, or as someone has said, “What a person can be, he/she must be”).  Basically, you need to have the first level of needs met before you can start worrying about the next level, and so forth.

But it seems to me that in American culture, perhaps Western culture, we seek to meet the higher level needs by over doing the lower level needs.  Don’t we use more and better clothing and shelter (what our appearance says about us, what our car says about us, what our home and our address says about us) to feel good about ourselves - to find love; to “belong”?  Maybe my disconnect is that I fall into the category of people who just want the basics met so I can move on.  But since I need love and belonging, I go along with the craziness.  (I wonder how many others do the same.)  To be open and honest, I never got to self-actualization.  I don’t know what my passion or my potential is.  I have a hunch that my progression up the needs hierarchy stalled out after love and belongingness.  Perhaps because of the compromises I made in order to get love and belongingness, my self-esteem never developed sufficiently to allow me to move on to self-actualization.  In my heart of hearts I do feel that all the preoccupation on appearance is really shallow, but I guess being deep is no fun.  I don’t know.

When I came across the following quote, attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, I thought…that’s it!  This is how I can explain how I feel.  The quote was, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”  I have also heard it said as “Great people talk about ideas; ordinary people talk about events; small people talk about other people.”  It didn’t go over well when I tried sharing this with others.  I hastened to explain that I had no illusions about being great, but that my mind tends to gravitate towards ideas and events, and not what is wrong with (or even right with) other people.  Well, the people I was trying to explain myself to were people who spend a lot of time talking about other people.  They categorized themselves, and then accused me of calling them small minded people.  I guess I was focusing on the Ideas/Events/People plane, but they were hearing the Great/Average/Small categories.  I wasn’t trying to change them, just to explain myself. 

Anyway, as part of “going along in order to get along,” I learned to keep those kinds of thoughts to myself.  Unfortunately, I don’t always recognize when a particular thought or idea is going to have the same or similar unintended effect.  Once in awhile, to try to fit in, and also to try to be amusing, I say, “You know - deep down I am really shallow.”  I hope they don’t think I am really saying it about them. (Wink, wink).

One thing I realized only recently is that most women want the fashions, styles, trends and fads to keep changing.  They don’t want to wear the same thing this spring that they wore last spring.  They don’t want the same swim suits, summer dresses, accessories, etc that they wore last year.  For the longest time I thought women were the victims of some great conspiracy that somehow kept changing the rules on them, so that they had to buy new clothes each season in order to be socially acceptable.  But now I see that women really want to wear new styles, colors, etc each year.  The old conventional wisdom was that women dress not to please men, but to please other women.  I think it is closer to the truth to say that they dress to please themselves, which entails wearing the latest fashions.

I must have taken an anthropology class some time during college, because I remember reading how even in the most primitive tribes the women could be seen doing things to enhance their attractiveness, such as with the use of special adornments and colors.  The women generally went bare breasted, and at least one anthropologist mentioned that the women who had the most to be proud of, physically, did indeed seem to act proud and use their physical assets to best advantage. I recently saw where a woman wrote that historically the survival of the human species depended on women enhancing their attractiveness to the males.  I think if she understood the male sex drive better, she would know that being female was all that it would take to get the males to do their part.  Extra effort is appreciated, but not necessary.  Or as one wag put it, “Women need a reason to have sex; men just need a place!”

Another remarkable thing about the free enterprise system – to backtrack a little - is how millions of autonomous decisions made by millions of people every day result in stability and predictability.  I would have expected chaos and crisis management (That’s government!).  The aspects of human nature that keep the private sector humming seem to be the profit motive and enlightened self-interest.  Human nature being what it is, we can count on these to guide the system.  Critics of the system call it greed, but aren’t we simply acknowledging human nature and allowing it to work for us, instead of denying it or working against it?

I mentioned being a cooperative person, and maybe a passive person.  Sitting in coach class in an airplane, once we get the ‘OK’, the person in front of me may decide to recline his chair back.  This is somewhat annoying, but I recognize that he has the right to do that, so I just deal with it.  After a few minutes, I have forgotten how much more room I had with my tray before he leaned back.  However, I would never recline my seat back, unless the seat was empty behind me.  I know I have the right to, but it seems inconsiderate.  I don’t mind someone inconveniencing me, but I would not do it to someone else.

I got into the habit of parking near the far end of the parking lot and walking to my destination, not because I gave any thought to avoiding “dings” from other cars, but because I like to walk after driving for awhile and it is good exercise.  As I walk past empty parking spots that most people would have grabbed with glee, I think to myself that maybe some old person will park there and be grateful for the convenience of being close to their destination.  The thought crossed my mind recently, “Wait a minute.  I am an old person.”  But really, I like to walk, and I hope someone who needs the closer spot gets it.

I used to walk Brianna to or from Los Alamitos elementary school once in a while, and if a driver was waiting for us to clear the cross walk, I would hold her hand and jog a bit.  It only saved the driver a second or two, but I felt it was a nice way to acknowledge that they were patiently waiting for me and I in turn was trying to be considerate of them.  By fourth or fifth grade Brianna was knowledgeable enough to inform me that we had the right of way and did not need to hurry.  The driver just had to wait.  I think I tried to explain that, since I am also a driver, I can appreciate when a pedestrian is trying to be cooperative.  Later I realized that the larger issue is: “Yes, I have certain rights, but I also have the privilege of giving up my rights in order to make someone else’s life a little easier.”  We don’t always need to insist on our rights.  It seems to be my nature to take opportunities to give up my rights when there is really nothing important at stake.  Remember that bumper sticker I mentioned: “Be kinder than necessary”?

Driving a car in the Bay Area, there are several freeway exits that I know require me to get over into the exit lane way early, as in more than a mile to a mile and a half before the exit.  It just backs up that much.  I am fully aware of the alternative of waiting, passing a few dozen cars, and then forcing my way into the exit lane.  I see some people do it every day.  Bobby calls it “making friends.”  (NOT).  I would not deliberately do that to the drivers around me, but if someone else does it, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt that they maybe are not familiar with the exit and/or have a genuine emergency and need special consideration.  I know the likelihood is low, but maybe that is the case.  Why should I get all perturbed about it?  How much of my time is being wasted?  Not much, if any.

I guess because I am the “plan ahead” type, I am almost never running late for anything important, so what do I care if I am one more car length away from the next intersection?  One other thing about driving:  Not only do I try to be a defensive driver, which to me means to try to be aware of everything around me and to anticipate what other drivers might do, but I try to let other drivers know what I am planning to do and I try to never do the unexpected.  I try to leave people room to change lanes in front of me, if it looks like that’s what they may want to do, even if they have not yet signaled.  But I won’t do something that might confuse the driver behind me.  I also will not stay in the fast lane if there is no one in front of me, unless there also is no one behind me; and if the guy behind me wants to go way too fast, I just move over and let him.  He can tailgate the next guy, not me.  Again, maybe he has a genuine emergency, although I doubt it.

I also try to accept what I call tailgaters by considering that some people are quite comfortable following very closely at high rates of speed, while I am not.  If I follow too close I find myself on what I call “high alert,” meaning that I am constantly aware and ready in case the driver in front of me has to brake suddenly.  It makes me very uncomfortable, but some people seem to have no problem with it.  If anything, I tend to allow too much space to build up in front of me, which seems to make the driver behind me uncomfortable.  I try to close the gap to something reasonable, but often not soon enough, and drivers go around me.  At least I am aware of it and am trying to correct it.  But that is also why I stay out of the fast lane, except to pass or when there is no one else around.

On a related matter, I have seriously had to ask the question whether there was no longer a rule regarding using directional indicators for turning or changing lanes.  It seems like most drivers do not use them, except maybe in extreme emergencies.  I have always used them, because I want the drivers around me to know what I am planning on doing.  Lately I feel like an old-fashioned “fuddy-duddy” or a sap or something for signaling when it seems like no one else does.  Bobby used to call old people “flenders.”  I don’t know where he got that, but it does seem to fit somehow.  At the time, people with grey hair were flenders.  So now I guess I am a flender.

The other day I was telling Brianna why I think older people drive slower than others, and why maybe we should be glad they do.  As we get older we become less confident in our peripheral vision, judgment, coordination and split-second decision making – even our ability to turn our heads quickly and far enough to the left and right.  I think my issues with that began around the time that headrests became standard/mandatory in cars.  I was so accustomed to looking around, instead of relying on side view and rear view mirrors.  I also experience times when I can’t remember, for example, whether I treated a red light like a stop sign; whether I was aware of what was in front of me when I was looking to my left or right while going forward; whether I looked for pedestrians before making a right on a red, etc.  It seems that after a lifetime of driving, we do many things automatically without consciously thinking about them.  The good news is that we do the right things.  It is just that our conscious minds do not need to pay close attention any more.  It is still rather disconcerting, however, and we should all be grateful that older people drive more slowly and deliberately.

All of my comments here are not meant to be self-congratulatory.  They are all in one way or another in support of my statements about being by nature passive or naïve or lacking in common sense.  The good news is that you can have a very happy life regardless.  I do think that I have become less judgmental over the years, which may be the opposite of what most people experience.  We are all familiar with elderly relatives who become increasingly opinionated and obnoxious over the years.  Each generation of adults complains about “the kids these days…”  I loved the saying I came across: “Don’t judge other people; you have no idea what their journey is all about.” 

There are some people that I try to stay away from, because I do not enjoy being around them but really, I don’t know what they are going through.  I don’t know what their upbringing was like, what issues they had with their parents or their siblings, etc.  That doesn’t mean that I want to know, however.  I’ll pass, thanks.  Part of being passive is avoiding conflict and confrontation whenever possible.  It’s just my nature.  I heard a speaker one time say that being tolerant about everything meant not having any convictions about anything.  I mulled that over for awhile and then thought, “What if one of my convictions is tolerance?”  This is all said with a sense of humor, however.  Will Rogers was famous for saying, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” and I enjoyed the humor when I heard someone say, “Well, Will Rogers never met you!”