People Puzzles

Last night I took the boys (all three of them) to the Braves game. Thanks to a friend of mine we have the privilege of getting awesome club level seats, which does change the game a bit.

When I got home, around 4:30, ready to get everything together for the game I was faced with 2 boys who were not thrilled about going. My oldest has always been the type who needs routine and advanced warning.  I had not given him enough advance warning that we were going to the game.  My youngest, I swear he just looks for opportunities to be difficult sometimes, and so he decided he did not like baseball.

I let them pick out a restaurant to eat at before going down to the field. That seemed to perk them up and off we went. My oldest was much more into going to the game by this point. My youngest was still being difficult. We get downtown, parked, and started walking toward the stadium. My youngest makes the statement that when he grows up he will never come downtown, he does not like the city. My oldest looks at him and basically tells him he is crazy. My oldest loves the city and is dying to get up to NYC. By the end of the night my youngest was very in to the game and really understanding what was going on and cheering enthusiastically. My oldest was in the club area with my husband enjoying an ice cream cone and not caring about the game.

So here is why I titled this "people puzzles." The whole night I was amused at how wrong any assumptions I could make were. I assumed the boys would be excited and ready to go to the game when I got home, I was faced with just the opposite. When my oldest son was starting school we moved to the suburbs (although we prefer the city) because we felt our oldest would do better in the suburbs based on his personality. He actually prefers the city. I have been counting the years until we can move in-town, thinking that when my oldest graduates in 4 years we could move my youngest to the city because he has a personality that would do well in that environment, he claims to hate the city. My oldest was more interested in going to the game but barely paid attention. My youngest said he hated baseball, but ended up actually knowing quite a bit about the game and really got into it.

These are my own kids whom I have known their whole life. I feel I know them really well, and yet they change their personalities on me continuously and are never exactly what I expected.

I began to think about the assumptions we make about people whom we barely know. Work relationships, friends, neighbors. We are often so full of assumptions and opinions of other people when we really know very little about them and when we have no way to keep up with their continuous changes. People are changing all the time. I hear and talk about how fast technology changes....technology is a snail to how fast an individual person can change. We also have so many, possibly an unlimited amount of facets to our personalities, it is impossible to know who or why a person is as they are at the moment. I could, and if I had the time, would dive into the various psychological theories. But the point is, or lesson learned, is when we are dealing with another person in our life, we need to pause to figure out who they are at that moment and how that fits in with the situation at hand. Assumptions and memories of the past are major obstacles to getting to know another person.