Untraining

A successful friend in the programmer world prefers to hire people with little or no training. This is because it is often easier to train employees to work in their programs than to re-train people who have been doing it differently for some time. It makes sense to me.

I see this all the time in the personal lives of people who surround me. You know this and experience it. The question, which comes to me from a young friend, (young is extremely relative as I get older), is how do you teach old dogs new tricks? How do we cut off the choices and actions that aren't serving us well or are actively hurting us? Which actions are addictions and which are habits or learned responses to situations? Are we doomed to repeat the same things until we get hammered over the head or until they kill us?

I have been pretty good at catching the drift in a lot of areas of my life and pathologically doomed in others. One good experience happened when, after I had gotten a divorce, I ran into the guy who was my boyfriend before I met my husband. Jacques and I had had a lot of great fun together, but it fell apart when I realized he had many layers that I never knew. Some of his stuff was not that great, partly because I didn't understand it because I was so young and partly because it was illegal. Also, my parents really didn't like him (for same reasons) and his mother didn't like me. We were only 20 and those things mattered. His mother really didn't like the way his father flirted with me. I was pretty oblivious.

Jacques and I broke up but stayed friends, sort of. He came to my wedding and we all hung out. After about 10 years we sort of lost touch. After I was single again, I heard that he was divorced and we got together and had a great happy fling and talked all the time and then one day I was reliving the very same moment from the past when I decided it was not meant to be. He was lying and covering up something and I sent him packing. I was so very grateful for that flash of clarity and it saved me another minor heartbreak. I really didn't want any heartbreak when I was trying to recover from my divorce. He was living with another woman who was a cousin of a good friend and hadn't bothered to mention it.  Shit. No way, Jose.

I have a friend now who just married her old flame and hit that moment when things had gone too far. When she got clarity, she was deeply involved and painfully hurt.

"But I really love him." is a phrase I hear from people who know there is something very wrong with their relationship, even sometimes dangerous. I understand that. I love and loved Jacques but I am not with him. One of the measures I have for that kind of love is to ask myself what the "but" is. I ask myself whether I love the person as he or she is or whether I want to change them. Sometimes the answers are so obvious as to be ridiculous. What comes to mind is the leaden notion that if we love someone, then we have to suffer with them. All love isn't meant to be "and they lived happily ever after." That idea shows a profound lack of imagination if any strong emotion between people means that they have to couple up. For me this is especially true if a third party is getting hurt.

If something isn't right, sometimes, you will know, it is worth the world to make the effort to fix it. Other times you have to decide whether you are going to repeat the same actions until you die, or take courage and make the change while you are still able. Both directions take courage, but one almost always has a better outcome.