Purists & Greys…

You’re a purist when you’re young. We all were. Unless you were born with the wisdom-ous (Thank you, Joey Tribbiani…) soul of the philosophical ancients who understood that the more one knew, the less one thought they knew, you were a purist.

There was no room for grey. Life was better when everything dovetailed neatly. There were no unanswered questions, no secrets that could not be looked into to reveal the truth, no sadness or great pain that could not be understood, no character that could not be summarily approved or dismissed as good or bad. Or so we wanted it to be, in our innocence and naivete.

We looked at the world with that lens, and that lens could lead to hardness and unkindness and angst. It sometimes led to snap decisions and the discounting of people. People whose feelings would be hurt, and we would not know or understand the magnitude of our actions or their pain until years later… when there was no longer any way of reaching out to tell them we never meant it that way… or if we did, we understood better now and that either way… we’re sorry.
We were also on the receiving end of the purist perspective. We felt the cold, unreasoning sting of it, but could not put a finger on what grounds we had been so arbitrarily written off, even if we’d been given the parting ‘kindness’ of having the cause named.

Perhaps becoming one of the greys seems a little cynical. Defeatist, even. An acknowledgement that nothing is truly just or pure or admirable in this world, and to see the grey is to view the world through a polluted lens. But perhaps it is also an understanding of just that, which gives way to making a little room for the surprises and complexities of life… and the exigency for compassion.

Perhaps the great divide between the purists and the greys can be overcome peacefully, with the recognition that very few things in life are incredibly clear-cut, and that kindness (even if it must be coupled with distance sometimes) is the only thing in our moral code or life that needs to be an absolute.

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