Being Right

I will admit that I like to be right; I like the superior feeling I get from knowing I'm better than you. The trouble comes when I meet someone more right than me or someone who is right in a way I used to be. And the older I get, the more people I meet who indeed seem at least as "right" as I am and often, even more right.

Confronted repeatedly with this evidence, I spend many hours, like as I am trying to go to sleep or when I am driving alone in the car, puzzling out how I can be right and someone else can be right and we are not doing things at all the same. How can I be right to use a homeschool curriculum and my unschooling friends be right in their fluid days? How can I reasonably argue that I'm right to feed my pets a raw diet when the pets of my childhood ate really cheap kibble and lived to their dotage? How can I be as uptight as I am about food and not strive to be as uptight as my even more uptight friends? If they are more right, why am I not trying to do the same thing they're doing? How can my very amorphous beliefs regarding god and the universe seem so very right when so many people I love might fret over my salvation? How can I commit myself so entirely to homeschooling in the face of my quite strong belief that it almost doesn't matter how school happens? How can I claim any superiority?

The Truth, as I see it, is I cannot.

I can only live in my skin and make decisions from behind my own eyes. And while I love to hear how other people do things and how they got to that point, it does not mean it will change my mind. I also love to talk about how I got to where I am in my thinking and doing, but I've given up on claiming I know what I'm doing. I try to serve my opinions with a heavy dose of my own doubt. I love the saying, "Your mileage may vary," because it's so complete. It helps me remember how much nicer life is when I am not superior, when I am just open to what comes my way.