To Breathe Both Hot and Cold

I pulled this fable from Aesop Fables Online.  Ignore the moral at the end.  It's incorrect.  I'll give you the real lesson you should learn from this fable.

But before we get to that:

A long time ago a Man met a Satyr in the forest and succeeded in making friends with him. The two soon became the best of comrades, living together in the Man's hut. But one cold winter evening, as they were walking homeward, the Satyr saw the Man blow on his fingers.

"Why do you do that?" asked the Satyr.

"To warm my hands," the Man replied.

When they reached home the Man prepared two bowls of porridge. These he placed steaming hot on the table, and the comrades sat down very cheerfully to enjoy the meal. But much to the Satyr's surprise, the Man began to blow into his bowl of porridge.

"Why do you do that?" he asked.

"To cool my porridge," replied the Man.

The Satyr sprang hurriedly to his feet and made for the door.

"Goodbye," he said, "I've seen enough. A fellow that blows hot and cold in the same breath cannot be friends with me!"

Moral lesson: The man who talks for both sides is not to be trusted by either.

WRONG!  Sorry Aesop, but if Disney taught me anything it is that you were killed because your fables and their morals upset people.  If people are willing to kill you there must be because you got them wrong, right?  Er, well... probably.  So, back to my declaration of wrongness.

The Moral of the Story: To Be Inconsistent Is To Be Human.

Everyone breathes both hot and cold in the same breath.  That trait, along with opposable thumbs, large craniums, the ability to make and use tools, and murder*, is what makes us human.  Among other things.

(*see Battlestar Galactica, and the Book of Genesis in the Bible for that matter.)

Case in point.  I refuse to use the automated doors at Target.  I go to great lengths to use the manual apparatuses.  So when I insist on using elevators and escalators instead of stairs my friends balk and call me duplicitous.

People can't seem to accept what they see as contradictions in their fellow man.  But doing things that don't make sense is what makes us what we are.  Beautiful, special, and lovably irritating.

Our inconsistencies, our idiosyncrasies, our non sequiturs.  That which does not follow.  All of it makes us into something more than just Satyrs.  And in the end is that not what life is all about?