Life's procedures

Yesterday I was listening to a medical doctor as she was speaking to my daughter.  She was trying to recommend a follow-up treatment, but she seemed a little uncertain.  She mentioned that there were a couple of different protocols for the follow-up as a reason for her uncertainty.  She had to review for a moment or two the two different treatments, then she recommended one.

Many fields follow protocols.  Medicine is one of the most protocol-driven fields there is, but that is due to the high stakes of life-altering substances and techniques for conditions and due to resulting lawsuits.  The military is a protocol-driven field as well.  That's because order and danger from weaponry are paramount to life and death.  Psychology is a field full of protocols because of the various detrimental results that could happen from influencing or conditioning the way people think.  The field of education doesn't call their procedures protocols, but the procedures to follow come as a result of standardized curriculum and testing over that curriculum.  So, yes, they are protocols.

It would be nice if life adhered to protocols, but it doesn't.  There is no set system of procedures through life that yield "best results."  Religion would have people believe that there is a procedure for best results in life, but many times I hear double-speak because it also advises of the struggles of life even if following the procedures in place.  Countries like to legislate procedures for best results, but people are so different from each other that the morality arising from such legislation yields mixed results at best.

All of the fields mentioned above are in interim stages of development right now.  There really should be just expert training in known procedures and let the experts piece together other combinations for advancement than to have protocols established.  Protocol only produces status quo and mediocrity.  It has been nice for the interim as we have advanced.  But we're past that stage of development.  And it isn't a reflection of how life works anyway.

We really go through life with our best guess at how it should be lived.  If we follow the crowd's best guesses at life, we usually don't bother to distinguish ourselves from them in any way.  If we march to the tune of our own drummer or take less traveled paths, then we find ourselves going it alone in a lot of cases without support or trust.  It's more than a little difficult to navigate through life with any assurance that everything works out nicely at the end.

In fact, life is ragged, curved, back and forth, repetitive, harsh, and dilemma-presented.  Sometimes we find others who make their best guess in the same fashion that we do.  That's a beautiful thing when that happens.  And it's so beautiful because it happens so infrequently.  I recognize those infrequent beauties much better now.  But, there are so many that fight our best guesses, and they're hard to rid from our lives or from their influence on our life experiences.

By the end, I don't think I will say so much that I have figured life out.  There's really nothing to figure out since life happens rather randomly.  And I really don't want to say that I followed all the standard procedures.  I hope to say to those whose best guess was very close to mine, "I really enjoyed our walk together!"