Jul 18, 2006 19:52
I ended up on a kind of funny train of thought today. I was thinking about how so many of the lessons we learn from our parents (well, and most lessons in life really, but I was thinking about the parent thing specifically) are in a non-verbal manner. You know, the whole "lead by example" paradigm in the context of parent-child interactions. Anyway, non-verbal communication and learning by example are obviously pretty inexact sorts of methods. After all, you learn to act or not act in a certain manner in certain situations by observing, not by having a set of rules dictated to you. Sure, inference is the method by which you expand specific examples you've observed into a general mode of behavior, but how do you know how your parents (on whom you're modeling your actions) would act in EVERY situation? You don't, of course, because you can't observe them in every situation. So, in actuality, we're modeling our behavior on something that has multiple possible sources of error: 1) the input (we don't have a complete set of data), 2) our parent's fallibility (even if you generally behave in a given manner, everyone has atypical moments), and 3) our own fallibility (how often do we misinterpret, willfully or accidentally, that which we see around us?).
I guess my point is, just how often do we go around life behaving in a fashion that we really wouldn't, if we had just had a slightly different perspective on a few formative moments when we were young? Or if we had seen, or hadn't seen, one interaction of our parent's that was atypical for them or particularly illuminating?
Sorry for the rather heavy-duty departure from my normal LJ posts. Just kinda on my mind (everything's perfectly ok everybody - don't read something dreadful into this topic).
At least I didn't post pathetic poetry or something.