Oh Brother, Who Art Thou?

A friend and I were corresponding about a road trip she took recently. She reconnected with a brother, and found herself surprised at who he was. She and the brother had apparently not really talked or corresponded for quite some time – maybe 20 years.

I don’t know the details of why the estrangement occurred in the first place. There are almost always all sorts of reasons for these sorts of things. I think part of it was that she made some assumptions about what he must believe, and he made some similar assumptions about her. Probably things got said that reinforced those assumptions.

She has a lifestyle that most folks would call alternative. He converted from something to Mormonism. She was getting wild tattoos way before wild tattoos were all the rage. He was apparently deeply involved in his Faith. She assumed his Faith would have little room for her lifestyle, he probably assumed her lifestyle would mock his Faith.

The years went by. No voices crossed phone lines. No letters came into mailboxes. Email became a “thing”, but email inboxes remained uncluttered by messages from one another.

Then a conference came up that she wanted to attend, and it was close to where the brother lived. A hand was extended, and grasped, and a dinner happened.

And they liked each other. They found one another to be far more open to the other than either had expected. She was, after all his sister. We all have faults after all, and who’s to say which faults trump others, and what are really faults anyway? He is, after all, her brother, and his heart is open and good and accepting.

They enjoy dinner, and are amazed at the similarities they share as brother and sister. They feel the glow of reminiscence as they tell stories they haven’t thought of in years.

In the depths of our DNA, we’re all brothers and sisters at some ancient place. Like my friend and her brother, we’ve all had assumptions and misconceptions woven into the lens through which we see those distant brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors. Those assumptions and misconceptions maintain walls and borders that are most strong and excellent. They help the morally corrupt among us sow hatred of anyone a little different that we are. They stoke the machinery of war, and maintain a constant flow of our tax dollars into that machinery.

In the relative scheme of things, I wonder if it was easy for my friend to reconnect with her brother. He’s her brother after all. Or is it even harder with those that we’re closest to? It’s not a matter of forgivingness for past wrongs that I’m talking about – it’s a willingness to be open to truly understanding the other person, without the burden of assumptions and misconceptions.

I think it comes down, once again, to that amazing power our brain has to categorize. We build a category for something, and then our brain does a really great job of sorting the world we walk through very efficiently, placing new things into the categories it’s built. So, I have a brother that becomes a Mormon, and my wonderfully efficient brain drops him into the category it’s built for Mormons. I don’t need to ask him what he believes, and waste all that time listening to how he really feels, when my wonderfully efficient category already has a set of answers.

I don’t need to spend time getting to know my Muslim neighbors, because I have a wonderfully efficient category for Muslims that tells me what I need to know about how they behave and what they believe. I don’t need to waste my time with my coworker who’s quite vocal in his support of Atheism, since my category for Atheism tells me all I need to know about him.

Life is so efficient when we let those efficient categories in our brain work to keep the world around us nice and tidy. We don’t need to think too much. We don’t need to go through the messy and uncomfortable soul searching and self-evaluation.

Or we could get a bit messy, and have dinner with our brother.

Author: Neil Hanson

Neil administers this site and manages content. View all posts by Neil Hanson