Shades of Gray

My son Noel’s education in ambiguity began at age 11 when we visited Amsterdam. As we strolled down the cobbled streets, he spied his first coffee shop complete with customers smoking pot. Not hippie or student backpacker customers but men in business suits and suburban housewives.

The streets harboring these coffee shops were models of safety and civility compared to many parts of our home city. Cars sped by but without the element of aggression I see in the U.S. People on the streets treated each other respectfully most of the time. Homicide in the Netherlands is so infrequent that when it happens, it makes front page news for weeks.

Back home, Noel had just completed the school district’s required unit on drugs and addiction in his health class. In the materials even coffee was listed as a drug. Marijuana was presented as the first step in an inevitable downward spiral towards crack or meth.

As he and I walked along, I could almost see his mental gears working overtime as he tried to reconcile what he was seeing in Amsterdam with the messages he’d gotten at school. He’d been exposed to other cultures all his life through foreign-born relatives and family friends, travel and forays into ethnic neighborhoods and food.

Furthermore, the idea of cultural relativity wasn’t new to him; he’d seen it in operation at family reunions and in school. But his encounter with legal pot, enjoyed the same way one would enjoy a glass of beer, jammed his circuits.

On one hand, I’m glad that schools educate kids about the harmful effects of addictive drugs. I used to work in special education classrooms and have seen what meth addiction does to families. I myself smoked during high school and college, back in the 70s and 80s, when any 15 year-old could stroll into 7-11 and buy cigarettes. Quitting was hard.

On the other hand, during the semester Noel was taking the health class he went through the True Believer phase typical of converts to just about any cause, when everything is black and white. He knew what was best for the entire family, and Dad’s homebrew wasn’t on the list. Sitting down with a glass of merlot at the end of a long day sparked lectures on drug abuse. My one remaining friend who still smoked had to sneak out the door when exiting for a cigarette break, just as I’d weaseled out the bedroom window (oiled to eliminate creaks) at 15.

Middle school kids are often still literal thinkers. It can be challenging to help them understand that the difference between acceptable risk and real danger is a matter of degree, that the world comes in shades of gray and that a loved one isn’t stepping off the deep end just because he likes a glass of Red Hook on a hot day.

He questioned. We talked. I presented him with the challenging idea that it’s possible to hold a sincere belief with all his heart while simultaneously accepting that equally sincere people disagree with him. I suggested that his best friend could oppose him on a hot issue and still be his best friend. We discussed the possibility that in any debate, both people can be right at the same time and that many truths exist side by side. I made him look up paradox in Webster’s.

Initially the concept of paradox puzzled him. How could two seemingly opposite ideas contain equal truth? In a culture used to linear thinking and obsessed with numerical ranking, a person can’t like both red and green equally well. She can’t be right-brained and left-brained, spiritual and skeptical or nice and nasty. That’s why political rhetoric that presents issues in good-versus-evil terms is often so effective. We want things to be simple. Life is hard enough without having to wrap our brains around multiple layers of truth.

However, when I couched these ideas in the “parallel universe” storytelling convention used by the fantasy authors he enjoyed, it all began to make sense to him. In such stories, two societies exist side by side in the same place but often their worlds are mutually invisible. He began to understand that the mere fact that he can’t see or understand something doesn’t mean it isn’t real or valid.

The fact that I hope he doesn’t start smoking pot doesn’t mean that I condemn the Dutch for keeping it legal, regulated and taxed. Contradictory? Probably. But who among us doesn’t hold sets of hunches, beliefs or inclinations that don’t jibe or fit together neatly like puzzle pieces? Whose inner blueprint doesn’t include shades of gray as well as black and white?

Being aware of the gray areas discomforts us. It brings up dilemmas. At what point does enjoyment segue into need, then into addiction? At what point does my attempt at flexibility turn me into a doormat? When is it appropriate to give up being diplomatic with difficult people and start pushing back? Which of my personal values and my culture’s values should I make relative and which are absolute?

As Noel goes through life, he’ll have to decide these things for himself. An enlarged awareness of other ways of life probably won’t make the job easier. Meeting people of other backgrounds or who hold opposing beliefs face to face makes it harder to vilify them when conflicts arise. In the course of some future adventure he may meet a potential soulmate and later find out to his dismay that some of his friend’s core beliefs are fundamentally different from his. Being able to see shades of gray doesn’t guarantee a comfortable life.

But I’ve concluded that growth is impossible without discomfort. Staying inside a small box, associating only with people who are mirror reflections of myself, would not only give me a grossly distorted view of the world but would limit my ability to experience all this world has to offer.

The best gift my husband and I were able to give Noel (now 20)  could be the ability to savor the world’s cultural bounty even as he struggles with conflicts and questions, to know that life doesn’t have to be comfortable in order to be good.

Seeing life in shades of gray or, using a more appropriate metaphor, in living color takes practice. However, it’s worth the effort. The view is so much better than in black and white.

My son Noel’s education in ambiguity began at age 11 when we visited Amsterdam. As we strolled down the cobbled streets, he spied his first coffee shop complete with customers smoking pot. Not hippie or student backpacker customers but men in business suits and suburban housewives.

The streets harboring these coffee shops were models of safety and civility compared to many parts of our home city. Cars sped by but without the element of aggression I see in the U.S. People on the streets treated each other respectfully most of the time. Homicide in the Netherlands is so infrequent that when it happens, it makes front page news for weeks.

Back home, Noel had just completed the school district’s required unit on drugs and addiction in his health class. In the materials even coffee was listed as a drug. Marijuana was presented as the first step in an inevitable downward spiral towards crack or meth.

As he and I walked along, I could almost see his mental gears working overtime as he tried to reconcile what he was seeing in Amsterdam with the messages he’d gotten at school. He’d been exposed to other cultures all his life through foreign-born relatives and family friends, travel and forays into ethnic neighborhoods and food.

Furthermore, the idea of cultural relativity wasn’t new to him; he’d seen it in operation at family reunions and in school. But his encounter with legal pot, enjoyed the same way one would enjoy a glass of beer, jammed his circuits.

On one hand, I’m glad that schools educate kids about the harmful effects of addictive drugs. I used to work in special education classrooms and have seen what meth addiction does to families. I myself smoked during high school and college, back in the 70s and 80s, when any 15 year-old could stroll into 7-11 and buy cigarettes. Quitting was hard.

On the other hand, during the semester Noel was taking the health class he went through the True Believer phase typical of converts to just about any cause, when everything is black and white. He knew what was best for the entire family, and Dad’s homebrew wasn’t on the list. Sitting down with a glass of merlot at the end of a long day sparked lectures on drug abuse. My one remaining friend who still smoked had to sneak out the door when exiting for a cigarette break, just as I’d weaseled out the bedroom window (oiled to eliminate creaks) at 15.

Middle school kids are often still literal thinkers. It can be challenging to help them understand that the difference between acceptable risk and real danger is a matter of degree, that the world comes in shades of gray and that a loved one isn’t stepping off the deep end just because he likes a glass of Red Hook on a hot day.

He questioned. We talked. I presented him with the challenging idea that it’s possible to hold a sincere belief with all his heart while simultaneously accepting that equally sincere people disagree with him. I suggested that his best friend could oppose him on a hot issue and still be his best friend. We discussed the possibility that in any debate, both people can be right at the same time and that many truths exist side by side. I made him look up paradox in Webster’s.

Initially the concept of paradox puzzled him. How could two seemingly opposite ideas contain equal truth? In a culture used to linear thinking and obsessed with numerical ranking, a person can’t like both red and green equally well. She can’t be right-brained and left-brained, spiritual and skeptical or nice and nasty. That’s why political rhetoric that presents issues in good-versus-evil terms is often so effective. We want things to be simple. Life is hard enough without having to wrap our brains around multiple layers of truth.

However, when I couched these ideas in the “parallel universe” storytelling convention used by the fantasy authors he enjoyed, it all began to make sense to him. In such stories, two societies exist side by side in the same place but often their worlds are mutually invisible. He began to understand that the mere fact that he can’t see or understand something doesn’t mean it isn’t real or valid.

The fact that I hope he doesn’t start smoking pot doesn’t mean that I condemn the Dutch for keeping it legal, regulated and taxed. Contradictory? Probably. But who among us doesn’t hold sets of hunches, beliefs or inclinations that don’t jibe or fit together neatly like puzzle pieces? Whose inner blueprint doesn’t include shades of gray as well as black and white?

Being aware of the gray areas discomforts us. It brings up dilemmas. At what point does enjoyment segue into need, then into addiction? At what point does my attempt at flexibility turn me into a doormat? When is it appropriate to give up being diplomatic with difficult people and start pushing back? Which of my personal values and my culture’s values should I make relative and which are absolute?

As Noel goes through life, he’ll have to decide these things for himself. An enlarged awareness of other ways of life probably won’t make the job easier. Meeting people of other backgrounds or who hold opposing beliefs face to face makes it harder to vilify them when conflicts arise. In the course of some future adventure he may meet a potential soulmate and later find out to his dismay that some of his friend’s core beliefs are fundamentally different from his. Being able to see shades of gray doesn’t guarantee a comfortable life.

But I’ve concluded that growth is impossible without discomfort. Staying inside a small box, associating only with people who are mirror reflections of myself, would not only give me a grossly distorted view of the world but would limit my ability to experience all this world has to offer.

The best gift my husband and I were able to give Noel (now 20)  could be the ability to savor the world’s cultural bounty even as he struggles with conflicts and questions, to know that life doesn’t have to be comfortable in order to be good.

Seeing life in shades of gray or, using a more appropriate metaphor, in living color takes practice. However, it’s worth the effort. The view is so much better than in black and white.