The Mandelbear's Musings

I hear it all the time from the kids: "I don't understand why I have to {go to school / clean my room / whatever}." After a futile attempt to make them understand, the eventual answer is always the same:

"You don't have to understand it. Just do it."

Pot, meet kettle.

It happens with the flower_cat, too: we have a misunderstanding. Or what I think is a misunderstanding. I phrase something badly, and she's close to tears. I keep trying different ways of explaining, and it usually makes matters worse.

Sometimes it's really important; I have to keep trying. It can take days. Most of the time I'd be better off saying "You may be right," and maybe if it's important tackling it the next week from another direction altogether.

I'm somewhere between a writer and a scientist. I need to understand things, and words are usually the way I get to that understanding. Observing, asking questions, pondering the answers, asking more questions, explaining, writing... It can take a while, and I'm afraid it can be hard on the people around me. Once I think I do understand, I want to correct anyone who appears not to understand. Often that's worse.

I might, after all, be dead wrong. I'm almost always willing to have my misunderstandings corrected -- that's the scientist part. And the programmer. The universe, the computer, is always right, and I'm always wrong unless things are working smoothly.

It's different with people. Very different. Sometimes we're both right. Often we're both wrong. Almost always, the other person doesn't know that I'm willing to be proved wrong, because that's not how most people are. They get angry, or hurt, or both. Constantly probing, questioning, restating what seems obvious to them but isn't to me, or vice versa, makes it worse.

Usually it doesn't matter; it's enough that we all have enough tolerance to get along in spite of our different ways of understanding whatever it is. Friendship helps a lot, too. There's a different kind of understanding between friends and lovers: a willingness to accept the fact that the other person is the way they are, without having to know why they're that way.

Finally, I'm beginning to learn that I usually don't have to understand, either. It can be useful, sometimes, but more often it's enough to accept the way things are -- the way people are -- with tolerance rather than complete understanding. Computers are so much simpler...

I finally started to understand all this on my walk today, and now I want to get you to un...

Oh. Right. Never mind, then.