Compatibility?

Pilgrim on a Long, Long Journey

We had hints in adolescence of the heartbreaks in life, the veil of tears. They were largely heart wrenching when romantic relationships didn’t quite work out.

When we were just a little older we were looking for compatibility and a life shared together with a romantic partner. One current philosopher, Alain de Botton suggests compatibility is something that occurs only after one ties the knot. He put that more expansively in the most popular 2016, New York Times article on 5/28/16 as follows:

“The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the ‘not overly wrong’…

View original post 17 more words

A Little Different

“The exact pattern of grooves and ridges in brains is distinctive to each individual—as distinctive as your fingerprints—but whether it has anything to do with your intelligence or temperament or anything else that defines you is unknown.” Bryson, Bill. The Body (p. 57). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

We are all so different. Fingerprints. Cerebral grooves and ridges. I guess we are a little like snowflakes.

Medical examiners are very different (rare) as there are only 500 working fulltime in the U.S. When I was a medical examiner doing forensic autopsies for the State or County, if all else failed to identify the person, we had the unique dental work of most of us upon which to rely. That was essential in decedents where facial recognition was not an option. It would frequently involve a new x-ray to match an old x-ray that contained the unique shape and location of of even one of the person’s fillings.

And so you ask, how did you tolerate those things? I didn’t inhale very deeply in the autopsy room. That’s a little different.