Once In A Blue Moon

Once In A Blue Moon

John Paul Derryberry

If I ask you to think about one of your worst co-workers, a person comes to all of our minds. It was someone who we saw on the schedule or walked through the door, and we immediately realized our days just gotten a lot harder. Yet when the planets aligned, this worst co-worker pulled their weight, and your shift was terrific. The drive home from work was filled with two thoughts: why can't it be like that all the time, and wow, how fun was it when they put it all together. We do this throughout our lives. This mental exercise occurs in relationships with family, significant others, and friends. We get a sliver of them at their best and react as if we have seen them make a turnaround from who we thought they were; even though we have mountains of evidence to the contrary.

I think we do this for a couple of reasons. First, we hope the people we love will turn the corner. It's good that we leave the door open for people to change, grow, and evolve into the person we know they can be. I'm successful in life because people believed in my ability to grow and develop into the better aspects of my personality. Face it, lots of us need a redemption arc; processing trauma and life events is hard, and if second and third chances weren't a thing, large numbers of us of us would have been deemed failures before we had the chance bloom into something beautiful.

Second, the more dangerous and less healthy reason we take one good day as a sign of change, is that we struggle to admit when we are wrong about people. When we place our trust, emotions, and love in someone who loves to walk all over that at their best and stomp through and destroy it at their worst; It's embarrassing, deflating, and a kick in the gut to explain to others that we picked the wrong person. We feel others' judgments occurring about halfway through our story about why we are estranged, struggling, or on the outs. So that one day, someone at their best becomes an imaginary mountain of evidence that they have turned a corner. Look, it could be, or maybe, it's a blip. We don't know; there is no way to predict with 100% accuracy, what comes next.

The best predictor of future behavior is previous behavior. So the odds are against that one great day being anything other than a blip. But the odds are just odds. That's why we should cautiously leave the door open that the person has turned the corner, because leaving the door ajar is the best thing about humanity. We want people to turn things around; we hope for it, and many in our population pray for it. Yet, we should cast our gaze away from those once-in-a-blue-moon people to the folks who have consistently been great at respecting our relationship standards and only occasionally have off days.  

Consistency in our actions builds trust, grows love, and makes things healthier. We have to learn that we can leave the door open for people to change, but that the door doesn't swing back wide open after one good day. We can't rave about it to the people who consistently show up for us, or they will feel taken for granted;because we have all been the person who consistently engaged in healthy relationship patterns, only to hear about how the person who didn't, did so for one day. It hurts, it's confusing, and ultimately leaves us wondering why, once-in-a-blue-moon is more significant than day-in-and-day-out!