Embracing inconsistency

I was walking around Union Square today and found myself thinking about people and relationships.

We all have so much experience in interacting with people, and in some ways we're all expert armchair psychologists. And the work I've been doing the last three years has really given me a lot of insights into what drives people.

Today I was noticing how much I want to come up with a theory that explains all the inconsistencies that are embodied in the people I know. And I don't mean a general theory, but rather a person-specific theory, an explanation for why that friend of mine Jane Doe does what she does. Why she says X and then does Y without batting her lovely eyelashes.

As I walked around today I was thinking that, no mattter how much I learn about human behavior, my theories will never be more than that... just theories. And while they may have elements of truth in them, they will never be the truth.

And as I tossed this particular thought salad, I came back to an idea that I've had before, that maybe it's okay for people to be inconsistent. Maybe there's nothing wrong with people just being how they are. I know that I want so many things that are incompatible; everyone does. Inconsistency is inherent in choosing--and creating--our path. We always live in the moment, trying to map our way from remembered points in the past to imagined points in the future.

Which illuminates something else: it makes no sense for me to try to come up with a strategy that will "work" with somebody based on my theory of who they are and what's motivating them. If my theory is, at best, only partially true, any strategy that I come up with is likely to produce some other result than I intended.

All that there is is living in the moment. Accepting people as they are. Right now. Inconsistencies and all.