The Mistake of Missing the Meta

In our second week of dating, the girl that would become my wife tried to end our budding relationship.  It started when I was making an important point, which went like this:

I said, “All adults are screwed up somehow, right?”  She nodded, so I continued,  “That means all children grow up to be screwed up adults.”  She looked at me enraptured, or so I thought at the time.  Now I’m pretty sure it was disdain.  I concluded, “Thus, as a parent, the best one can do is screw up one’s children intentionally instead of unintentionally.”  My face no doubt showed a mixture of smugness and triumph at my cleverness and cuteness.

And she said, “Get out of my house.”

I made a mistake, and thankfully she forgave me for it (and plenty of others since).  The mistake is a mistake we all make, constantly, and we need to work on it.  I made the mistake of missing the meta:  the meta-language, the meta-conversation, the meta-context.  Meta is what’s beyond what’s going on right in front of us.  It’s the “third eye” described by mystics that gives extra perception of the situation.  And in this conversation, the missed meta was “I’m speaking with a mother that might take offense”.  And she rightly did take offense.  Another missed meta was “you’re trying too hard to be clever”.

With a healthy dose of meta, we can understand ourselves better, understand the positions of others, and build bridges that are missing.  It makes disagreements more human, solutions more inclusive, and builds context for our situations.

Unfortunately, either as humans or in this particular era, we are struggling with meta.  We have a President with no meta.  We have self-obsessed reality TV stars that miss the meta.  We have Justin Beeber.  Losing ourselves in electronics is a great way to avoid the higher order thinking and observation that meta requires.  Dehumanizing the opposition is lost meta.  Feeling clever rather than kind is lost meta.

This is an easy thing to fix.  In fact, you have the skills today.  You have a voice in your head (or one of many) which is a detached observer.  It’s an ongoing commentary on “what is this person really saying” or “why am I truly behaving this way at this moment.”  Or even “why am I reading this article about Taylor Swift’s new album when I don’t listen to Taylor Swift and I was originally shopping for contact lens solution?”  Seek out that voice, turn up the volume, and create change for the better.