The Whole Enchilada

One of my favorite movies is Broadcast News. The setting is a network news office. It’s about the ethics and personalities of three cast members. I discussed it with my friend Bill, who has been in the new business for years. He said he wasn’t able to tell who was the hero and who was the villain. My response was, “Exactly. That’s why I like it so much. It’s real life.”

The standard formula for movies is to provide heroes to admire and villains to hate. Reality is rarely like that.  Great people in the public eye often fall from grace when a character flaw is exposed. High quality in one area of life doesn’t guarantee there won’t be deficiencies in other areas. More than one thing can be true, even if they seem contradictory. Here’s an example.

After watching a documentary on Lance Armstrong it seemed clear that he was less than virtuous in several aspects of his life. He also  started the livestrong organization, which has benefited a vast number of cancer patients. More than one thing can be true.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius understood, saying “How beautiful Plato put it. Whenever you want to talk about people, it’s best to take a bird’s-eye view and see everything all at once–of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings and divorces, births and deaths, noisy courtrooms or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials markets–all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites.”

I’ve learned that to better understand someone, I need to see the whole person. However, this is not a math equation. A plus one and a minus one do not equal zero. Faults don’t negate virtues and virtues don’t cover up faults. They simply are, independent of each other, and still of the same person. Understanding is different from evaluating. It doesn’t need an opinion. Human character is complex and messy, including mine. My  goal is  to resist the urge to label and instead observe what is. All of what is. This is best done when I also look for why, which includes motive, background, and innate personality. Then proceed accordingly. Nothing more complicated than perception.

May you have enough today, one moment at a time.