As a kid I loved the book That’s Good, That’s Bad by Joan M. Lexau. It’s a simple story about a boy in a jungle running from a tiger and encountering misadventures with a rhino and a crocodile. The writing and the pictures are very straightforward and are punctuated with judgments as to whether the action on the current page is good or bad.

My friend was recently going through a breakup. Her boyfriend, generally a nice guy, just wasn’t being that nice to her. He would cancel plans with her, showing up late or not at all. He was kind of irresponsible with money. Seemed emotionally incapable of having a discussion without an explosion. His general lack of interest in showing her that he valued her and the relationship left her feeling, well unvalued.

AND anyone who knew him would describe him as a genuinely nice guy. When they did hang out, he was fun and kind and helpful and they laughed and generally had a great time. She spent many a night pleading with the relationship gods to just make him be worse so she could see him for the bad that he was and end things.

As children, we see things as good or bad. People are good guys or bad guys. Objects are good or they are bad. As we age we have the unfortunate task of accepting that fully formed human beings are complicated and possess not only both good and bad qualities but also lots of in between ones.

Was Jack London a racist? Did Martin Luther King Jr. cheat on his wife? Was Mark Twain obsessed with fame? Did Amazon take a stance against the travel ban? Did Nordstrom stop carrying the Ivanka line as a statement or because of lack of sales?

The world and the people in it are complex. Unfortunately, the childhood gift of keeping everything in their one box doesn’t hold up. Good people do bad things and vice versa and more often than not human beings are not good or bad, they are fully flawed, beautiful, stumbling along, developing humans.

“Wrong turns are as important as right ones. More important, sometimes.”

When I was in my early 20’s I devoured Richard Bach’s, One and The Bridge Across Forever. The author and his wife, Leslie, fly a plane through concurrent realities meeting alternate versions of themselves. I think the books were supposed to make me fall more deeply in love and be willing to risk it all for my soul mate.

Though I missed catching the love bug I was deeply and profoundly moved. You see as these two people visited themselves in parallel planes, each situation showed what their lives would have been like had they made different choices.

What I saw was that I could be more brave. I could risk making the wrong choice because some substitute version of myself would be living out the other choice somewhere else.

I could leap into the unknown, take risks, try things out. If it didn’t work it didn’t really matter.

What would you do if you weren’t so scared of making the wrong choice?

I don’t like sports. In my earlier years I had an angry politically polarized opposition to them in a way that is generally reserved for our self-righteous youth. My infuriation was typical: The disproportionate allocation of resources and attention on sports vs. arts and education. The destruction of the environment to keep our elitist golf courses pristine. The lack of respect for education by the “dumb jocks.” The artificial world created by lugging children around the town creating a never ending scheduling hell and distracting obsessions when there’s real work to be done in the world. I could have gone on for hours.

Do you know what gets the highest number of viewers on television? Football. People really like football.

Recently, I had the most delightful evening with a friend I met about a year ago who is on his way to becoming a very dear friend of mine. We sat and talked for hours and we both walked away better people. We allowed ourselves to be changed.

Allowing yourself to be changed does not feel comfortable, indeed you must go through some irritation. There were so many moments where my tight grasp on my beliefs wanted to shut down the conversation. Wanted to send me away feeling correct and firmly holding my view of the world in place.

In talking about rape on college campus he said, “I just want to smack these young girls for allowing these boys to behave like this.”

My feminist brain exploded, alarms going off, shouting inside about victim shaming, responsibility etc. insults dying to pour from my mouth and put this man in his place.

Thankfully the side of me that’s constantly curious kicked in. I listened. I asked questions. Why do you think that is? Tell me more. I wasn’t trying to win the debate, I wasn’t trying to wait for my moment to make my point, I was curiously trying to understand who he was and what he thought. And he was equally curious.

We learned. We grew. We talked about life. We talked about why teen girls seem to lose their self-worth and assign it solely to the attention they can attract and hold from boys. How much of who we are is inherent and how much is learned, dissecting specific examples from our lives to see what we brought into the situation and what we learned from them as the incidents shaped us. We discussed whether equality should mean lowering the bar to let more in or raising the floor and how to raise the floor for all. We talked about language, the beauty of it, the weaponization of it, the responsibility of the quick tongued.

We talked about curiosity.

I was in a hotel bar eating some lunch and the Tom Brady story was on every T.V. people were talking about the decision to allow him to play after the famous ball-deflating incident of 2015.

I exhaled my solidly held hatred for a world I don’t understand and I texted my friend who likes football. I asked him, what happened with this story? Why did they change their minds? Why does it mean so much to people? I asked the bartender, what’s this all about, what are your thoughts on it?

Empathy is about being able to put yourself in another’s shoes. Curiosity allows you to open the solid grip on your world perspective and to be effected by the world. Without allowing for constant curiosity we will achieve the very sad accomplishment of going to our graves unchanged. We will remain solidly stuck in the place we came in at, with no better understanding of ourselves or the world around us.

Without curiosity there is no empathy, without empathy there is no learning, without learning we can confidently remain on our conveyor belts with our securely adhered blinders on until the end of our lives.

I host a huge Thanksgiving dinner at my house every year. In my normal routine cooking doesn’t often make the priority list. So I get it all in at once. For three days straight my sisters and I cook. We are more of an “ish” crew so the meal begins when everyone arrives and throughout the day people show up, they snack, they drink and they help.

I heard a story once about a robber who went to an elderly woman’s home to rob her. She was excited at the sight of an able bodied man at her door and rushed him in to help her move a large piece of furniture. She had several tasks that needed doing and she was gratefully walked him through them as he hung pictures and moved bureaus. The afternoon ended with some tea and cookies and two new friends.

Of course in a world where the Internet allows Abraham Lincoln to warn us of the dangers of Facebook, this story could be completely false. The point however, remains valid.

So many of us are afraid to ask for help, not wanting to impose, not wanting to look weak, not wanting to feel indebted. We look at it as a sign of weakness. In reality people feel better when they are helping. It allows them to connect. It allows them to have a place in the world.

I have a neighbor and we’ve known each other for years, we’ve always wanted to connect more but there seemed to be some barrier – time, the awkward childhood rejection trauma that makes us hesitate in creating friendships, who knows why the barrier was there. She removed that barrier in one very simple text, “I hate to bother you but I really need someone to hang out with my very needy toddler for 15 minutes so I can get this project done, could you possibly come by for a few minutes.” There it was – the connection created and not reversible. I was needed, I was a part of something, I was invited into her life and the barrier permanently crumbled away.

You want the people on your team to feel more connected to the work, your kids to feel more connected to the family, your friends to feel more connected to you. Invite them in. Ask them for some help, even just for 15 minutes, let them know they bring worth and value and that you need them. Doing it all yourself doesn’t make you a superhero, it makes you an island surrounded by people who feel unneeded.