Know Myself

A creek. One little boy jumps from rock to rock. His father does the same. His mother approaches another little boy, the slightly older brother. “Why aren’t you playing anymore?” “You said not to get our shoes wet!” the boy points at a shoe with a wet toe. “Oh, go play! I just meant you should be careful.”

I was the little boy ever so happy to be allowed to go back to jumping over the flowing water.

My mom says she should’ve realized earlier that she didn’t really need to caution me about anything. Yet she continued to do so. A few years later, when I started first grade, she told me “Come straight home after school. You cannot play; you must come home.” That turned out to be an unfortunate choice of words. Partway through the morning, my teacher told us to line up. It was recess time, but she said “We’re going outside to play.” That was another unfortunate choice of words. I grabbed my bookbag. While my class walked toward the playground, I ducked out of line and started home. It seemed strange that the crossing guard wasn’t at her place, but I looked both ways and crossed the busy street. I was nearly halfway home when a sudden thought struck me: I’d forgotten my lunchbox. I ran back to the school. In trying to get back into my classroom, I was discovered by another teacher who escorted me, despite my protests that my mother did not allow me to play, to my class.

So I sound like a definite rules-follower, right? For years, I ignored the evidence to the contrary. My mother’s #1 rule about walking to school was to never ever enter the bar at the corner, yet in second grade when my friend Mike wanted to go in there to buy licorice – he was hesitant to go alone – I went with him. More than once. How could I do something like that? I mean, I’m a rules-follower.

Can a person hold two contradictory ideas in their head at the same time, believing both? I profess a belief that there are no rules, only guidelines. Yet I still label myself as a rules-follower. That doesn’t make sense. I believe rules are semi-optional, yet I follow the rules nearly all the time. Only “nearly,” though. Once or twice a year, I shatter a rule or cultural norm, but then kind of forget about it. “I nearly never…” I know from engineering that the problem that nearly never happens is nearly impossible to track down.

Finally – recently – I quit ignoring the times that I broke rules and really looked at them. Was there some similarity between them? It turned out there was. In every case, I chose the happiness of someone else over the rule. In nearly all of the recent examples, it was something for one of my children. The mystery is solved: I’m a people pleaser, not a rule follower. I want to make other people happy, and if that means breaking a rule, so be it. I probably didn’t need to learn the motto of my high school – “Men for others” – because I came from the factory pre-programmed with that idea.

Self-knowledge is always good. Now that I realize what I’m doing, I can weigh the situation better. When I feel a rule going gray, I can try look for who I’m trying to please and see if it’s really worth breaking the rule. My guess is that the result will be about the same – that I’ll continue to weight the happiness of the person over the impersonal rule – but I could be wrong. At least I’ll realize when I’m making a dangerous jump off a rock-solid rule and won’t be surprised if my shoes get wet.