Life Lessons

People make mistakes.  All the time.  I feel like I’m the home office for them (ok, I’m being humorous).

Jeff Pearlman, whom I often post links to, writes of a time that he committed what was supposed to be a harmless prank.  It went terribly wrong.  In the end, only Pearlman himself was hurt but it was a lesson learned.

I don’t really know Jeff.  I’ve interviewed him twice.  We graduated a few years apart.  We’re on different ends of the spectrum about a lot of things.  Yet I get the sense he’s an OK guy.  He seems to have lived a decent life.  Married, two kids, the whole thing.  He’s constantly checking his own pulse to make sure he’s doing right – by his wife, his kids, his world.  Struggles with religion and so on.  But I know he isn’t always right.  He obsesses over his pure hatred of Sarah Palin.  He’s a hypochondriac.  And more.  I know this because I’ve read it all on his blog.

He lets most of it out – warts and all.  On occasion, so do I, and I struggle with it all the time (we’ve been down this road).

I never stop learning.  Never stop learning that all people aren’t made the same.  That the way I can laugh with one person isn’t going to work with another.  That I’m also flawed.  That I don’t always say things the right way.  That I can also do better. 

I will do better.

There’s this notion that people don’t change.  That’s utter garbage.  It depends on what needs to be changed.  My core hasn’t changed in (almost) 42 years, but I’ve altered things over that time.  Opinions have changed.  Things that seemed the right way to go in 1987 don’t fly in 2010.

There’s nothing deeper here.  No “Rule 55.”  Just something that I’ve been thinking about, and Jeff helped crystalize it for me.