The Soft Brick

You might not know it by looking,
but we were all under the weather this night

     It's been an interesting week at the Brick House.  All three members of my family have been sick and a usually very polite coexistence has at times turned into something less.  It got me thinking about how we treat each other in various situations, not just family, but the family of man.  In Aesop's Fables there is a story of a fox that sees a lion and is in awe of him.  But as time goes by and the fox grows familiar with the lion the awe begins to wear off.  Before long the fox has no special regard for the king of the jungle.  The moral to this fable is one you've probably heard, "familiarity breeds contempt".  Now Aesop, whoever the booger was, might have put it a tad stronger than I would have but there is definitely truth in the moral.  The better we know someone the more likely were are to lose that initial disposition that most of us have to treat people we don't know with respect and courtesy.

     Let me clarify that just a bit.  I think that the more we get to know someone the more likely we are to be ourselves around that person.  That might mean that we are less polite and respectful if that is our basic natural tendency.  However, for the people that are closest to us it makes much more sense that we don't lose other positive qualities in the process.  I have a great example of this from the past week.  I would not say that my relationship with my son is all that polite.  We have been know to go at each other pretty good and we both like getting the best of the other in the manly world of insults and oneupsmanship.  But beside for this woman I know, there is no one in this world I care about more than my son.  One day last week I backed my car into his car in our driveway.  It is hard to deny it was my fault since his car was parked and unoccupied (although I think it must have been the woman's fault somehow).  Once I realized what I had done I ran to his car to see the damage.  It wasn't extensive and he already had a marred bumper so it wasn't that big of a deal, but I was crushed.  I felt so bad for what I had done.  He loves his car.  And even though when I told him what I had done he was very forgiving and nonchalant about the whole thing, it only made me feel worse.  Then the kicker of the whole incident was when he asked me about my car.  I said, "I don't even know, I didn't look at it."  Now I love my car too, a lot.  But in the course of the accident I didn't even think to worry about my car.  When I did go and look at it, it was scratched and looked a little less damaged than his, but I really didn't care very much.  My concern was for his feelings about his car not my feelings about my car.  This was kind of unexpected.  I am generally a pretty selfish person.  And like I said my car is one of my prized possessions.  So what I realized is that my relationship to my son, although sometimes less than polite, is an absolute steel bond because of our familiarity. I could give you other similar examples with other people that I'm most close with, but one makes my point.

     The people that we are closest with might be the ones that we forget to ask please or hold a door open for, but social niceties pale in comparison to the depth of relationship that we establish with those people.  It amazed me that I was more concerned with someone else's feelings than my own over something pretty superficial like a scratched bumper, but the real lesson for me was that I could put someone before myself.  And it wasn't an act of will where I sat for five minutes and thought WWJD, but it was my first instinctive reaction to the situation.  So during this past week of Kleenex and short tempers it's always good for me to remind myself that our familiarity has bred depth, not contempt.  I guess sometimes bricks can be soft.