Fences

In a conversation with my brother-in-law the other night, we were discussing the arbitrary fences that companies put around their products and services allowing them a rerasonable rational for pricing strategies that, in the end, benefit only themselves no matter what they explain to their customs.

And while this is commonplace in business, one only have to look at the drug companies and the mobile phone business for obvious examples, I did leave the conversation wondering how many fences we, as individuals, put up to benefit the ultimate consumer, ourselves.

Of course we know about the basic fences that most of us, unfortunately there are some who do not yet see this, recognize; racism, sexism etc. Fences that we have made many attempts to tear down and have succeeded, in different degrees, in different parts of the world.

But what about the smaller fences, the fences we put up day by day, to shut out the noisy kids next door, the sullen waitress, the man struggling to open a door with his arms full, the grocery packer.

Fences we place based on who we think we are, created from our values, that we unfairly transpose to everyone else we meet.

These fences that are so ingrained in ourselves that we sometimes do not even know we are doing it.

Fences have their importance, they help keep us grounded in who we are, to the beliefs than we hold true to ourselves, that which defines us as a person, an individual, but is it enough. In my youth I read somewhere one line of a poem, written by John Dunne (An English clergyman and poet) that said, “No man is an Island”. Intellectually I understood what he was trying to say though at that time, in my youth, I was more influenced by the individuality of my heroes: Shaft, Dirty Harry, Wang Yu. All characters that believed in their own sense of justice, a justice that they carried out despite, in in some cases, in spite of everybody else.

Now that youth is just a memory to me, losing the vitality and resilience that went along with it,  I’ve gained, with life experience, what I was lacking then, wisdom. And while I still enjoy the films of lone heroes fighting the establishment, I recognize them now as just stories, some good, some not-so-good, and not as a formula for life. “No man is an Island” finally hit home, finally moved form the brain to the soul.

So my youthful heroes no longer define a formula that starts and ends with the individual being the paramour for my id, for building fences that block out anybody else's point-of-view, culture or beliefs.

While I still have my fence up to protect my id, my ego, my self, I now have many gates, some pushed in, some open, but none locked and I try, not always succeeding I might add, to walk out my gates and up to the fence of the people I interact with, and surprisingly, more times than not, they open their gates and allow me in.