rent your opinions

“Rent your opinions, don’t own them, for they change.” – a very wise retired professor

at school with classmates

I was so sure of so many things at one time. I would have 10 kids, some of them adopted, be married to a woman, maybe a bishop. Lazy people took welfare. Homosexuals were terrible people. Guns were my right. God knew everything. I belonged to an extended tribe of whom I would always be a part. I had a lot of answers.

Now I am partnered to a wonderful man the last five years. I’ve found out that gay people are pretty phenomenal as a whole. I choose many in my current social group. I have mixed feelings about abortion, but I don’t believe male politicians should be able to decide for a woman what she does with her own body and reproductive health. I don’t believe in punishment as the cure-all. I believe in helping all people medically, with housing, food, kindness. If a person comes forward with a broken leg, we as a group are better off when we fix it. Especially out hearts. Physicality and pleasure are good, not bad. The terrorist is not just an external enemy. What part of the terrorist can I own as a part of my nation, my group, my daily interactions?

Yet there’s not room to be moralist or high-minded. Views I advocated so strongly twenty years ago, I now sit squarely on the opposite side with some. I remain open to influence and persuasion, still checking everything with my thinking, my experience, my internal wisdom. Who knows where I will have shifted in 20 more years? What truth that I hold fiercely now will be slapped from my hands by life events, new love and understanding of a person I esteem, collective consciousness, or technology? Part of me is admittedly unsettled. Another part of me refuses to hold a position simply for tradition, especially if it damages me or keeps me small.

I will never go back to some of the constructs that cause me to dishonor myself.

There are many things that I hold to after all of these years. Thankfully. Remembering them gives me sense of continuity. They include sitting at the piano lost in the stirrings of the chords and voice, without an audience, appreciation for kindness like water in a desert, joy over older couples holding hands, delight in watching little kids move about, a view of animals as peer creatures, Nature (with a capital N), camping, the helping professions, public service. Despite differences and ambivalent life experiences, my immediate family remains mystically important to me. Each individual relationship is its own unique space, but the group psyche still recurs.

I return to the foresight of the wise elder: Rent your opinions, don’t own them.