Every day, at eleven A.M., a crotchety, old professor walked through our school’s cafeteria. He had a bag lunch with him, but he insisted on grabbing a tray to lay his lunch on. I don’t know if the man was as wise as the typical old man, or if he was any wiser. I do know that the man had no allegiances. His lectures did not favor Democrats or Republicans, women or men, or majorities or minorities. He also didn’t favored me in anyway, even when I was the one talking to him.
When we tell people about a crucial, crisis moment of our lives, most listeners will openly side with us, regardless how they feel about it privately. Not this old man. It was annoying. I wanted him to tell me I was right just once. He did tell me I was right in circumstances, as long as all of the variables I produced for him were true, but he would always add that those variables were probably based on other variables that I hadn’t accounted for. I never left his class, or subsequently his lunch table, feeling that that I was unequivocally correct about anything I did. As a result, I sought his counsel on a number of issues that plagued me.
He never seemed pleased by my constant need to scurry over to his table with a question, but he never seemed annoyed by it either. He never greeted me in a pleasant fashion, but he was never rude. He was the type of guy that I’ve always tried to please, and I continually tried to gain his acceptance. A dog acts this way, I realize before I started my question. A dog finds that one person in the room that is ambivalent to their existence and attempts to befriend them. This could be a result of that dog knowing how cute it is. It could be a result of the fact that every human it runs across acknowledges its cuteness, until it runs across that one person that doesn’t overwhelmingly acknowledge it. The dog then has an identity crisis, until it can flip that one ambivalent character. Many people have commented on the objectivity I have about my life, and they’ve said that my powers of observation are beyond those that they’ve encountered, so why do I continually seek the counsel of the one person who never will? Am I as inscure as this attention loving, identity crisis dog that wants the one ambivalent person in the room to pet them and tell them,“You’re the one living life the way it should be lived?” The professor would answer this question and many others in one short, ambivalent sentence.
“My friend and I have been having a debate,” I say to this man I deemed wise. “I believe people are inherently good, until they prove otherwise.” I went on to tell him that I thought living with an optimistic mindset, in this manner, was the best way to live. I told him that optimistic people should be prepared to be wrong on humanity occasionally, but that those few occasions should not cause them to waver in their belief that most of humanity is good. “My friend thinks this is a naïve way of approaching humanity,” I told him. “He thinks it’s best to live by the idea that everyone you run across is corrupt, until they prove otherwise. So you’re prepared, he says, for that slimeball that you will eventually run across that attempts to dupe you out of all of your money. Not everyone you run across is evil, he acknowledges, but it’s best to live with this mindset in preparation for those who are.”
“Have you ever considered a third possibility,” my professor asked chewing on some awful smelling sandwich, “that the world doesn’t give a crap about you.” It may have been twenty years since that professor dropped that line on me, but it’s had such a profound impression on me that I can’t shake it. It’s as if he said it to me yesterday.
