#presumption

The presumption of innocence is a good thing in personal life too. This week, AOC didn't go to a public event for, she said, security reasons and got roundly attacked on social media as though she was just a deadbeat or insincere in her commitments. She gets a lot of death threats and spoke candidly about how severely traumatized she was in the January 6, 2021 coup attempt, so I'd take 'security reasons' at face value. But also we're in a moment when most people are overwhelmed, reorienting themselves in changed worlds and lives, exhausted, often grieving some kind of loss or other, and if they're not available or not showing up for something it might be because they're helping someone else whose suffering they don't need to broadcast or need help themselves or are just drained and recharging by being quiet and self-protective. Many years ago, I had a yoga teacher who reproached me for not trying hard enough when I was at a point where just showing up while struggling with the inertia and exhaustion of depression took a lot of effort. If he'd asked I would've told him, but he presumed he fully comprehended what I should be doing and what my capacity was. You cannot learn what you assume you already know, and you cannot teach well if you cannot learn. I never took his class again. This reminds me of the others who affirm that if you're not focused on their particular cause (or them) You Don't Care when it's actually that you're working your heart out on some other cause (or person or project) That Also Matters. But mostly this is a post about the fact that mostly we don't fully know what's going on with other people (sometimes they don't know themselves) and the assumption it's about you is often wrong. As is, often, any assumption that you know what it's about. The sister of the "presumption of innocence" is "the benefit of the doubt," but the doubt is in your own comprehension, even if the benefit is to others. Not knowing is one of the hardest things for people to master, it often seems, in an era when people like to jump to conclusions in the opposite of a leap of faith. We fill in not-knowing with all kinds of assumptions, assertions, projections, because not knowing is about confronting the essentially mysterious nature of life and consciousness, about the fact that we have to navigate by guesswork, prepare to be wrong, and at best be open to discovery. Even if you ask someone how they are, there may be reasons why they can't or won't give a full answer. We walk in fog; we walk on a twisting path through an intricate landscape and cannot see what is ahead; we walk through forests in which we cannot see past the first few stands of trees but know that life is going on there. We don't fully know who we ourselves are, who others are, what's going to happen, what else is happening, how something will play out. And if you're already stuffed full of assumptions there's no room for discovery. Not knowing is the openness and spaciousness that can reside in mystery or invite in understanding. p.s. A related thing is when people make assumptions about your family member, partner/ lover/spouse, boss, coworker/ collaborator, or other figure based on comparatively casual acquaintance. Or someone of high status who assumes that the person who treats them well treats everyone well, when that person has a different face if you're low-status, voiceless, powerless. (We see this so much around sexual abuse. By presumption of innocence I mean, innocent of what people tend to presume or assume: people can assume someone is trustworthy or safe who is not and do, as readily as the reverse.) You don't know how someone is in different circumstances, and often someone who is good at friendship can be terrible at partnership; someone who is fun in public has terrible anxiety or terrible rage in private, and so forth. Perhaps I should add that sometimes we don't know ourselves, haven't yet unpacked our burdens to find how heavy they are, seen what toll something took, understood why we can't when rationally we should. The less you assume the more you can know. Knowing you don't is a huge gift to everyone, yourself included.

Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."