I Live in the Center

I recently heard a political pundit say that the killing fields are in the center.

I live in the center. Put me with any set of points of view, and I’ll be in the middle trying to translate for them—not that they want me to. That would make some folks seem to be an approval seeker or a fence sitter. Not this one. I don’t change my mind with the wind. I don’t follow the polls or bend to what the neighbors think. I know exactly who I am, and I know exactly what works for me. I just find the like matter in between the differences.

It’s not that I can’t handle conflict. I’d fight for a cause, and I’d die for more than one. But I learned early on that most tenets are not worth the cost of a night spent in heated argument. I’m not likely to change what you believe, and why should I want to? Why should I think that where my heart has gone is where yours should want to go too? The idea is arrogant and disrespectful. I don’t want to see myself as being those.

I come from where every point of view has value.

It was ingrained in me from the start. It's how I grew up.

The four in my family who came before me were distinctly separate, unique human beings. They were unconditional love, vulnerable strength, reflective compassion, and thrill-seeking amusement. I stood in their center, a neophyte. I looked up to each one of them.

My role had to be the perceptive observer. It was the only thing that they were not.

I learned. I yearned to understand everything that made them tick—what they thought, what they did, what they said, how they said it, why they responded the way they did. I was constantly taking information in and looking for patterns, and finding algorithms to match their actions. I was a human behavior search engine. I learned their points of view by practically crawling inside their skin.

None of them had an investment in changing the others’ thinking. Thinking was part of who you are, not something that you did. Arguing was kept to the typical parent-child variety—mostly mother and younger-older, risk-taking brother, who preferred an emergency room or a reprimand to even a second of boredom.

He once told me, “Hey kid, if you’re going to get in trouble for doing it five minutes. You might as well do it an hour and have fun.”

He would get yelled at. I would get the anxiety for him.

My mother once said my only problem was that I had two brothers who were opposites and I tried to be like both of them. She got it right, but she was off by two. I wanted to be all four of them—mother, father, and two brothers. Still do. Still am. You can see them in almost every thing about me. I can tell you which one influenced almost every word and every gesture in my repetoire.

Learning about other people in that same way was almost self-preservation.

I was lucky to have four good points of view to draw those original conclusions from. Those conclusions prepared me to live inside the world, instead of outside looking in. Of course, I ended up in the center, always crawling inside other people's skin to understand their point of view. I'm often seen attempting to restate what someone is saying.

I come from where every point of view has value.

It was ingrained in me from the start.

I live in the center. It's the place that the pundit called the killing fields.

No wonder I feel so few things are worth the cost of an argument.

—me strauss Letting me be