I find my peace in learning that I am not special. I am pretty much the same as everyone else. We all want the same things underneath it all: to be free from fear and from pain. To have our families be well. To be fed, to be housed, to be loved and to love.

In trying to give up my need to stand out and to be important, I find a deep source of compassion and humor. It is when I know how things “should be” that I get into trouble. I have to let them be what they are.

What a ridiculous life! We all fart and poop and show inappropriate body parts by accident and slip and fall and it is ok. It’s ok. We laugh and love and go on.

That’s all for now.

So in your jobs and your daily dealings with people I must ask: how do you get through without feeling entirely weary? How do you get up, wash your face, eat your Wheaties, and make it through another day when you don’t see the positive changes you had hoped to make an impact on when the hubris of your youth was your driving force?

I really want to know.

Uh-UH.

He said the words without hostility. I knew he was only repeating what he’d been hearing the other children say since the party crasher had jumped aboard, but still…uh-UH.

I called him by his first and last name. “Come here.”

“I don’t like you to exclude people,” I said to him. “We don’t do that. It’s not nice to make someone feel left out.”

He looked down. “Okay.”

I thought about telling him that the cool thing to do would be to make friends with the new kid, and then tell the others, “He’s with me.”

But it was a party, not an episode of the Book of Virtues, so I smiled and and let him get back to having fun. He bounced off.

There were a few other parents within easy earshot of my little teaching moment. And though it pains me to reveal to you what a douche I can be, I’ve got to admit, I reared up a little on my moral high horse.

Catch that? We don’t do that.

The hell we don’t.

Not fifteen minutes later, I caught myself having a laugh at someone else’s expense. That moment was also within earshot of others. If they knew me well, and they knew the person who was being chuckled about, and the situation, they might have thought none the worse of me. But to anyone not in on the joke, it would have sounded mean.

As soon as I realized it, I was ashamed. And not because it obviously contradicted my mini-lecture to my son of moments before, either. Oh, no. See, you got that right away. It took me hours to realize that in addition to being a jerk, I am a hypocrite. I was just ashamed of the being-a-jerk part.

I stared at the ground, wishing I could disappear. I stole a cowardly glance around. In my imagination, everyone had heard me snickering. Everyone was thinking what a harsh and hateful bitch I must be. I’m a fraud. I’m no good. I make baby Jesus sad.

Then my son bounded by, and it occured to me to look at my mistake the way I had looked upon his; the way a loving parent looks at your shit when they catch you knee deep in it. 

In my heart I heard the one who brought me here calling me by name.

Hey. We don’t do that. 

Okay. I’m sorry.

Can you feel a smile you can’t see? I believe so.

Now get back to playing.

If anyone had been watching very closely (oh, the conceit of imagining others are listening to every word, watching every step), they would have seen me lift my head, and move on with a little bounce.

I think that just having a safe place to go talk is what is responsible for the real life changes our group members experience. Just knowing that I can lay out the worst parts of me and have other people say “Oh, yeah, I do that, too,” like it is no big deal - that is healing to my soul.

One of the subjects that comes up ALL the time for us is driving. Otherwise sane people seem to have a great deal of difficulty driving without resentment, aggression and hatred.

I have a theory: most of our lives are spent in either public places or in private places. In public, we have one code of behavior. We expect a certain amount of interaction with other people and have subtle unspoken rules to make it happen smoothly. We have to face people and to make eye contact.

At home, we have an expectation that we can have our stuff the way we want it and that no one will barge in and mess with it (unless they are our housemates or family members - and that is a whole subject for a different time). We know how things “ought to be” and we work to keep them that way - whether our perfect picture includes dust-free baseboards or the freedom to leave empty pizza boxes untouched for a week.

But our cars are our little private spaces we take out into the world, and a whole clash happens. Our cars act like our larger bodies and serve as our surrogates as we whiz around at 70 mph. So a threat to our car feels like, and often is, a threat to our physical selves. It is the place where we experience how all of our ideas of how things “ought to be” as they clash with others’ notions.

On the road, we often find ourselves behaving in ways that we never would anywhere else. Insulated from real face-to-face contact, we can act like internet trolls, acting badly and then zipping off, never to see the offended party again.

We say “Drive Carefully” but I want to make a bumper sticker that says “Drive Like You Care.” Like the person in the next car is your daughter, your father, your friend. They might be. I know someone who honked at and flipped off a confused old lady who had cut him off - and then found out that it was his mother. He has never, ever lived that one down.