What’s better, being right, or pleasantly surprised by being wrong? A choice between having your conceptions reaffirmed or being shown something different that defies your perception.

People are going to do what they are going to do. There is no real concrete way to know what that is until it actually happens. There is no way to decipher someone else’s intent until they have acted and it becomes a historical fact and not just a possibility. Even someone you know as well as anyone can know someone else has the potential to do something out of what seems to be the ordinary.

Most people are creatures of habit. What they do is what they have always done and that’s how we understand who they are. But that is not always a reflection of who they are within themselves. There are so many undercurrents to our individual humanity.

The people that consciously refuse to grow, the people caught in a situation where they wanted a different outcome, are the ones easiest to anticipate. I knew a man who was so deconstructed by his divorce that his life essentially stopped. Every bit of emotional energy was so focused on holding onto the feelings he had for his ex-wife. On regaining the life they shared together. Much to the disappointment of their children.

He became an absent father in almost every way. Physical distant, financially inconsistent, emotionally detached. Later in life his adult children knew to expect very little from him. I doubt they were ever proven wrong.

But what if he had switched things up and made an effort that wasn’t directly related to his ex-wife’s behavior? What is he had behaved as a parent and not the wronged man? what if he had shown those around him a different part of himself?

How destabilizing should that had been? How many more questions would that have created? How many more times when those around him would have wondered why he couldn’t have shown that part of himself before, when who he was was still a bit of a mystery? And how do those around him move forward with any sort of confidence in the man they thought he was?

Everyone has little idiosyncratic moments that are decidedly different from what they have done in the past. But not everyone has the will to change when it means letting go of what they know about life. His ex-wife moved on and developed a whole different way to face the day.

It’s somewhat satisfying and self reaffirming when people act exactly the way you expect them to. It gives our own perceptions some validity. It also strengthens the ground we walk on. The way we move through life.

Sometimes it is a pleasant surprise when someone behaves in a different kind of way. But it is also equally satisfying when we are allowed some security in how we see others.