| It's easy to find fault in things--far
too easy for most of us. Somehow, the flaws are
far more easy to see than the bigger picture, than the
amount of work and thought and preparation have gone
into a particular piece of work. Think about
it--if someone just painted his or her house and missed
a spot, what's the first thing we see? If someone
just cooked us dinner and used a bit too much salt,
what's the first thing we notice when we put the food
into our mouths?
And if we do notice the bare spot on the house,
aren't we doing the person a favor by pointing it
out? And if the food's too salty we may not be
able to eat it, so we'll definitely need to explain why.
Many of us carry this tendency to extremes,
though. Many people feel that they need to tell
everyone about every little fault that they find in
every situation. They feel that they're doing
people favors by pointing out what they see as flaws and
problems, even though they may not be in a position in
which people expect them to find mistakes. And
when they do so, they risk hurting people greatly.
When a kid shows us a piece of artwork, for example,
does it truly matter if the flower is taller than the
tree? What possible purpose can it serve to point
out what we see as a flaw when the picture already is
finished? We really need to consider the effect of
the criticism on the artist before we look for the
problems. Is encouragement called for, or
evaluation? We don't have to be teaching at every
moment of our lives--we don't have to be finding things
that need to be "fixed" all the time.
As a college English teacher, I find that very few
people other than my students ever want me to read stuff
that they write. There's a very simple reason for
this, too--in their experience, they've found that
English teachers look for the flaws and point them out,
and they simply don't want to put themselves up for that
kind of criticism. I learned this early and I
don't point out things like misspellings or grammatical
errors unless someone wants me to do so, but that
doesn't usually help--once someone finds out what I do
for a living, they want to avoid having someone else
find fault in their work.
When we find fault in something that someone else has
done, we're very often adding a negative element to
our relationship with that person. We're defining
limits of trust and sharing--if I know that someone is
going to find fault with everything that I do, I will
not share with that person unless I'm truly seeking
criticism. As fewer people are willing to share
with us, we lose much of the richness that comes from
and through that sharing, and we become more isolated,
less integrated. The loss of the sharing of others
is one of the greatest losses we can cause ourselves,
and it may even reach a point at which people just don't
want to be around us at all. There
are, of course, times when fault-finding is
appropriate. If a movie is simply awful, there's
nothing wrong with saying so. After all, movies
have been put out in the public eye, and criticism is
expected. But if we take it too far and find
things to criticize in every movie we see, we may find
people trying to avoid us in the future. If a song
is just awful, what's wrong with saying so? We
just have to be careful not to alienate friends or loved
ones who might like the song. Fault-finding
and criticizing, no matter what our intentions, tend to
drive wedges between us and other people. A person
who finds fault in everything is a person to be avoided,
when all is said and done, and who among us wants other
people to avoid us whenever they can? |
