Signs of the Times

I was filling out a form the other day and came to the question that always stumps me:
Married ____ Single _____ Widowed _____ Divorced ____

I'm married. On the mantle, there is a framed certificate, duly signed and certified, issued by the Division of Vital Statistics, Nova Scotia, Canada.

But on the form, what do I check? Married? Single? It is not, after all, recognized by the State of North Carolina, nor, for that matter, by the United States of America. And this was a Social Security form.

Now, this piece is not a broadside in favor of marriage equality, though I could certainly write one of those. No, this is inspired by a talk I heard yesterday at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, by our interim minister, Don Rollins. It corresponds with something I've been thinking about a lot more lately ---- worldview, or how we organize the world.

My field of devotion is, and always has been, education. I steeped myself in educational theory, I trained to be a teacher, but really I was more interested in how humans learn. My first ambition in the field was to research infant learning. Instead I went the traditional route and majored in elementary education.

From the beginning, it has seemed to me that the industrial model of education is counter-intuitive. Knowledge is not a commodity, learning is not a static skill set, and children are not identical products to be churned out at the end of a conveyor belt. Humans have the amazing capacity to take in information from many sources, combine it with previous learning, and form new, completely unique ideas from that process. Schools often do everything in their power to deter that.

Yesterday's challenge at UUFR was to think about how the perception of reality is undergoing a shift. I'm a 1950 Baby Boomer, used to being in the leading edge of change. It was my generation that, through sheer force of numbers, brought significant social and political shifts to American society. Some of the arguments still linger, given new life by the new traditionalists. But now, the early Boomers are going into retirement, and soon, retirement homes. The generations that follow don't share the mid-twentieth century worldview of the Baby Boom generation.

Some time ago, I read a book about "Indigo children", kids who seemed to be growing up with a different view of reality, more intuitive, less binary. Not for them, the strict categorizations of old, the black and white world that divides everything into either/or, yes or no. To those imbued with a 20th century worldview, this seems incomprehensible, at best --- unhinged, at worst. Everyone knows that people are either male or female, right? It's self evident. So what in the world is genderqueer? Transgender? Twin-spirited?

In a twentieth-century worldview there is right and wrong, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, Ford and Chevy, Us and Them. But people growing up today live in a vastly different world from the rose-colored memory of 1950s suburbia, where people knew their places and were By God happy to have a place at all.

Technology that was imaginable only to the visionaries of 70 years ago, has become ubiquitous, and has shattered the divisions that defined the geopolitical world in which today's powerfolks came of age. We still have boundaries and tariffs and wars and race, but make no mistake, the shift has already happened, and we're simply experiencing the after-effects.

It's not comfortable. I've always taken pride in my labels, whatever they currently were. I could define myself through the eyes of a world that understood the boundaries. I was a daughter, a mother, a libertine, an alchoholic, a Socialist, a wife, a lesbian, a Unitarian. It gave me both something to embrace and something to rebel against. But the labels meant something. At the same time, there has been a spark inside of me that yearns for transcendence.

I'm greedy now, for everything. I want to taste the coffee just the way I like it, rich and sweet with sugar and cream. I want to drink in the sky however it shows itself to me, whether it is heavy, leaden clouds or brilliant blue. I want to swim in the strains of Chopin until I find tears running down my cheeks from sheer joy. And I want to listen hard, speak from my heart, seek the soft center of the people I know and those I don't as well. I am no longer willing to cling to outdated labels because they seem to make life more manageable; you are not young, old, black, white, gay straight, ---- worthy or unworthy. You are the unique, amazing individual you are, and if I can't see that, it is a problem in me, not you.

It is the first time in life that I really know that my time is starting to run short. That causes me some consternation, not out of fear but curiosity. I want to stick around and see what happens. I don't want to come to the end of my consciousness chapter and not find out what the next chapter brings. But since I can't, while I'm here I want to keep greedily taking it all in, savoring even the hard and uncomfortable parts. Because even that is a label, you know.

Good, Bad.     Easy, Hard.      I, Thou.