The title of this first post may confuse many of you. No, you weren't tricked into reading a blog about relationships and marriage. Well, that’s partially true, this is about relationships, but we’ll get to that later. First, I want you to get to know someone even closer to you, someone you’ve been ignoring for most of your life. No, I’m not going to shame you for being an unfeeling cad, a workaholic who comes home late, works weekends, and never has time for those around you.

            I’m talking about someone even closer than your husband, wife, and kids. I’m talking about the man or woman staring into this monitor.

            Oh, c’mon Ron! Not another “8 Steps to a Better Me” blog.

            No, I wouldn’t do that to you. Never made it past step 3 myself.

            And I won’t tell you that you have to like yourself before you can love the rest of the world. It’s my experience that most successful men and women are never quite satisfied with their own performance. The best managers will sing praises about the people under them, then beat themselves up for their own lack of perfection. Thank God for them. They keep the wheels of our economy turning. If I ever look in the mirror and say, “Man, I’ve done it. I am perfect,” I hope that my wife is standing behind me to correct my opinion of myself.   

            I’m going to take you to an even more basic level, one that would be included in any anatomical chart if only we knew where to put it.

            Call it your spirit. Your soul. Your heart. Your conscience. It makes no difference. No matter how educated you are, how much you understand the physiology behind your makeup, you know there’s something beneath the layers of flesh and organs that the biology books never quite explained.

            For some reason, we’re all very different. Why are you nicely dressed and rising early each day to work hard while another man or woman your age is lounging around a filthy apartment, behind on the rent, and bouncing from one minimum wage job to another? Why do you stop to admire a flock of passing geese while another man won’t even bother to look up? Why don’t we all follow the same predictable habits, like every other wild creature on the planet?

            We all possess something inside us, something you can’t see on an x-ray or attach a monitor to. It’s what makes us feel. It’s why you’ll stop to help a stranger or drop a few bucks into the Salvation Army kettle, even though there will be no financial benefit to you.

            Is it just psychological? Some combination of chemistry, experience, and environment that creates this inner person? Possibly, I suppose. But tell me: is that man or woman who seems your complete opposite a brother or sister? A cousin raised in identical circumstances? Maybe even a father or mother? For some of you, a nerve has been brushed. Memories are flooding your mind that contradict the person you eventually became.

            How is it that a boy who was beaten repeatedly by his alcoholic father ends up an MIT grad? Or a girl who had the best of everything, including loving parents, end up a crackhead living on the streets of Los Angeles?

            The spirit, your spirit, is a funny thing. It defies logic. It’s the source of compassion and of hate. It keeps one man completely devoted to his wife for forty years while another is sleeping around after a few months of marriage.

            Even the most devoted of atheists must admit that we are not logical creatures. For even he can’t explain why he’s an atheist while billions of others worship gods they’ve never seen.

            Try this: pick someone out of the crowd. It could be the woman sitting next to you. Maybe the guy standing outside in the parking lot. Alone? Conjur up someone you’ve recently met. Try to imagine this person’s life. Does he get up at 5AM to work out because he was overweight as a child but now has the body of Atlas? Is she a corporate CEO with two cats that she talks to like her own children? Does he secretly wish to be out of his job and singing on American Idol?

            Of course you can’t know all these things based on appearance. But the possibilities are endless, aren’t they? The guy you just bumped in the hall could be a mafia hit-man for all you know. If we all evolved out of the same primordial mud that mice and cockroaches came from, then why the vast array of tastes, interests, fantasies, and favorite baseball teams?

            Every year, there seems to some story about how “human like” a chimpanzee, dolphin, or dog behaves. But let’s be serious. No matter how well a chimp can add single digit numbers, he’ll probably never throw an empty beer can at a TV because his team’s quarterback just threw an interception in the final seconds of the fourth quarter. While football certainly brings out the base animal behavior of most men, we tend to rise back to our human potential by Monday morning. The chimp will be content with a bowl of apple slices and a rubber duck.

            The purpose of the this chapter is not to pull you into belief in a greater power, but just in the unseen portion of your body that makes up at least a small percentage of who you are. I’ll argue that the figure is 50%. For now, though, a mere glimpse of that inner person will satisfy me and prepare you for what lies ahead.

            Not convinced? Okay, let’s look at the dark side of human behavior. I’ll start with a fictional character: Hannibal Lechter.

            While the character never existed in real life, the author of the book and screenplay didn’t just pull this infamous villain from his conscience. Hannibal is the culmination of months, possibly years of research. He represents a multitude of serial killers.

            What do you remember most about Hannibal? He was very intelligent, wasn’t he? Most would say even likeable. But there was something broken inside, something that drove him to do ghastly things, things that you or I couldn’t even imagine doing. Why? If we’re all composed essentially of the same mass of cells and tissue, what drives one man to kill dozens of innocent people and another to slam on the brakes when a squirrel dashes out onto the road?

            Even the most human-like animals don’t possess these kind of extremes in behavior.

            Need real world evidence? How about Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin. Intelligent, charismatic, even downright charming. Every cell examined under a microscope would show them to be identical to their fellow man. But each possessed the ability to kill. Anywhere from dozens to millions of human beings.

            Okay, enough of the dark side of human behavior. We all know it’s there. It drives us to brief bouts of depression every day when we read Drudge Report or watch CNN. I don’t think I need to drive home the point that something is definitely off kilter in the hearts of millions of human beings. At the same time, though, there’s a brighter side to the story. One you’ll rarely see on CNN or read on Drudge. You might see it in a human interest story, page C4 of your local paper, but it just doesn’t get the attention that the Jeffrey Dahmer’s will always get.