Doing It the Right Way

It is certainly creative!

How does one decide that there is only one right way to do things, which implies all the other ways are wrong? I think that only leads one to believe that someone with that viewpoint is rather narrow-minded. Why would you not just consider all of the other ways just alternative methods to do a task or undertaking? Could you not see that some would be better than others and many would be done to your satisfaction? Maybe one would rise to the top and be considered the best way to do that, but you could hardly just call it the right way of doing that activity.

Let’s look at one particular task in light of this concept. Is there a right way to cook bacon? There are several ways of cooking bacon that will all give good results because anyone who likes bacon knows this to be true. You can cook it in frying pan (some folks insist on a cast iron one), in a microwave (between plain white paper towels on a microwave safe plate is good), in the oven (on a cookie sheet between two sheets of parchment paper or on tinfoil), under the broiler (on a broiling pan to catch the drippings) and on a griddle on the stove or barbecue (similar to the frying pan method). And I’m sure you could come up with even more ways to cook bacon successfully.

So one could say that all is left to resolve is which one or more methods are better suited to your way of doing things or your requirements at that particular point in time. Some approaches are better for larger batches cooked at one time, while others are appropriate for smaller lots (some folks would ask why would you want a small batch of bacon?) and some methods allow you to collect the drippings after cooking while others make that a little more difficult. Some require more clean-up after the fact than others.

So can you honestly say that there is only one right way to cook bacon? I think the simple answer is that there is more than one way to do things right which could imply that the others are just wrong. Jase Robertson would often say “That’s just wrong” but that is just done for television since he is smart enough to accept there is more than one way to catch a frog. He apparently refers to himself as “a frog’s worst nightmare”. Some folks might say they never cook bacon and that is a personal choice. It should be considered that this viewpoint is neither right nor wrong.

And like cooking bacon another question a Canadian like me might ask is there only one right way to shoot a hockey puck? You could use a wood stick (if you can still find one), a laminate stick or a composite stick (if you are wealthy enough to afford those things) and you could shoot it forehand, backhand (if the stick blade doesn’t have too much curve), wrist shot, flick shot, slap shot, snapshot, one-timer, cannonading drive (thank you Danny Gallivan)… And the list can go on for some time. Mostly I shoot the puck poorly and that is one of many reasons I tried to play goal (the major one was a great respect for Johnny Bower and also the reason I hung up the pads).

So is there just one right religion, nationality, political party, hamburger, soft drink, beer, vacation place, sport, music genre, way to hang a roll of toilet paper, hairstyle, acting method, and way to poop? Try googling “right way to” and you will see a whole bunch of listings for narrow-minded folks that insist that the subject matter has a solitary way of being done to qualify as the right way of doing it.

I strongly suggest you avoid folks who insist that there is a right way to do things and find the folks that accept that there are several ways that you can do things and some are possibly considered better than the others just based on their viewpoint. And you could classify that viewpoint as tolerance, open-mindedness, progressiveness, permissiveness and even liberalism. It is interesting that I got most of the synonyms for tolerance here from a thesaurus which is a book based on alternatives.

Some folks have a very small outlook on life and that is sort of wrong really but I guess it works for them. I think it leaves a lot of room up there for air instead of possibilities.