Pondering the Past; Encountering the Future
I have been thinking much about the email I received from Bill...discussing the past, mulling over who we were, what we were about...where he is at in his life...
I understand his need for what he deems "morbid self-examination." I'm often engaged in that particular pursuit, trying to figure out who the heck I am and how I got to where I am.
When you don't expect to be where you are, you can spend more time on wondering how you got to that point than the average person might. For many, how they got from Point A to Point B in their lives is pretty evident--they did the Right Things and the Proper Life unfolded before them.
Yet when you take a different road, a path no one you know in your familial or fraternal circle ever took, it can cause anxiety. There's a sense of not being entitled to what one has received, or an inability to accept a god-given gift--or an inability to comprehend that one has indeed suffered a kind of personal catastrophe on the magnitude of a house-flattening tornado. (In my case, it's the god-given gift of "smarts," because everyone else in the family is either high school average or learning disabled coupled with a decimating divorce.)
There can be guilt, too--why me and not everyone else? or Why can't they accept that I'm different and let it be at that?
We look for that one relative who was special, or those incidents that shaped us. Knowing these things helps; yet they never really give the full answers to what and who we are. Nature and Nurture only give part of the picture. Sometimes, it's because we're a bit more perceptive than those around us. We see a pattern, don't like the revelation, and make a choice. We choose a new path and a new destiny because the one that our familial nature/nurture has set before us doesn't sit right.
Freely, we choose to go a different way, according to our own Will. Free. Will.
Hardcore philosophers don't like to discuss Free Will--for them it's all Nature and Nurture contained in the results of studies and theories. Yet us theologians love the concept. It often explains why we choose those odd paths that seem to run counter to both our nature and our nurture. There are lots of euphemisms for it: we hear a Different Drum, receive A Calling, take the Road Less Traveled.
Yet it is Free Will--our ability to choose--that spurs us on to change our nurture and, sometimes, our natures. After all, psychologists often tell us that when nurture is changed it can indeed effect our nature. We see how nature is changed with post-traumatic stress disorder; and how crying can help to change this changed nature yet again...
Often we are given a boatload of guilt for going down those different roads and away from the familial path. After all, the way they see it, that path is the natural path. It is the one they took. But you are never them. We are all different combinations of genes and culture and, perhaps something more...
If you think of it in the grander scheme of American culture, didn't most of our ancestors get here because they took a different road that led them away from the Old Country??
In a sense, when we exercise our Free Will, we move away from an "Old Country" of some kind. Our journeys, though, often start with the psychological--sometimes they also encompass the physical (as in re-location).
Yet the result is the same...we leave the Old Country for the New World.
We struggle in the New World to understand it and make sense of it--to understand that old question of "well, how did I get here?" We can analyze it, put it in perspective, draw up a map of the terrain to get a better perception of it. We can know something about the past, but never know it in full...any more than we can fully know the path that lies ahead...
Because we all have Free Will...and, certainly, are not Islands unto ourselves...
I understand his need for what he deems "morbid self-examination." I'm often engaged in that particular pursuit, trying to figure out who the heck I am and how I got to where I am.
When you don't expect to be where you are, you can spend more time on wondering how you got to that point than the average person might. For many, how they got from Point A to Point B in their lives is pretty evident--they did the Right Things and the Proper Life unfolded before them.
Yet when you take a different road, a path no one you know in your familial or fraternal circle ever took, it can cause anxiety. There's a sense of not being entitled to what one has received, or an inability to accept a god-given gift--or an inability to comprehend that one has indeed suffered a kind of personal catastrophe on the magnitude of a house-flattening tornado. (In my case, it's the god-given gift of "smarts," because everyone else in the family is either high school average or learning disabled coupled with a decimating divorce.)
There can be guilt, too--why me and not everyone else? or Why can't they accept that I'm different and let it be at that?
We look for that one relative who was special, or those incidents that shaped us. Knowing these things helps; yet they never really give the full answers to what and who we are. Nature and Nurture only give part of the picture. Sometimes, it's because we're a bit more perceptive than those around us. We see a pattern, don't like the revelation, and make a choice. We choose a new path and a new destiny because the one that our familial nature/nurture has set before us doesn't sit right.
Freely, we choose to go a different way, according to our own Will. Free. Will.
Hardcore philosophers don't like to discuss Free Will--for them it's all Nature and Nurture contained in the results of studies and theories. Yet us theologians love the concept. It often explains why we choose those odd paths that seem to run counter to both our nature and our nurture. There are lots of euphemisms for it: we hear a Different Drum, receive A Calling, take the Road Less Traveled.
Yet it is Free Will--our ability to choose--that spurs us on to change our nurture and, sometimes, our natures. After all, psychologists often tell us that when nurture is changed it can indeed effect our nature. We see how nature is changed with post-traumatic stress disorder; and how crying can help to change this changed nature yet again...
Often we are given a boatload of guilt for going down those different roads and away from the familial path. After all, the way they see it, that path is the natural path. It is the one they took. But you are never them. We are all different combinations of genes and culture and, perhaps something more...
If you think of it in the grander scheme of American culture, didn't most of our ancestors get here because they took a different road that led them away from the Old Country??
In a sense, when we exercise our Free Will, we move away from an "Old Country" of some kind. Our journeys, though, often start with the psychological--sometimes they also encompass the physical (as in re-location).
Yet the result is the same...we leave the Old Country for the New World.
We struggle in the New World to understand it and make sense of it--to understand that old question of "well, how did I get here?" We can analyze it, put it in perspective, draw up a map of the terrain to get a better perception of it. We can know something about the past, but never know it in full...any more than we can fully know the path that lies ahead...
Because we all have Free Will...and, certainly, are not Islands unto ourselves...
posted by Tish Grier at 5:35 PM
2 Comments:
Love reading your thoughts Tish. :) I truly believe that there are no mistakes made - only lessons learned. (Yes, I'm always full of cliches!) And that none of us would be who we are today lest not for the choices that have been made either by us - or by those who decided on our behalf when we were unable to decide for ourselves. My husband comes from a not so ideal upbringing, (thats being very kind!) and I always tell him that instead of focusing on the negative of how bad it was, or how poorly he was treated; to focus on how it shaped him into the man he is today. And how he may have had an entirely different life had his parents made choices other than what they did; or had he chosen to continue a cycle rather than change it. Making decisions, living them, and owning them - even if they don't go the way we hoped - is key to "encountering the future" (to paraphrase you!). I hope to proudly go wherever the road takes me, and stand behind my choices in life, without regrets.
:)
When I made the choice to “play the game” there were benefits. Hardly anyone has ostracized me for similarity. Support people in my life are willing to lend a hand when things go rough.
There is a down side, safe is boring. Choosing this “path” I’ve wound up like this, obtain the proper training, then I got the job; then there’s my marriage; then our house; followed by our kids and associated bills. Within a blink of an eye there are college graduations, then kids leaving. Then what? Retirement followed by death?
It’s during this safe time -- when all that’s planned comes together, -- that the payback is that I get old. That’s it. While working on this “path” I didn’t dare look toward those who blazed paths in new directions, neither good nor bad. Doing so would only get me contemplating other options and that could’ve derailed me. While on the “right path” I opted to turn my eyes away, put my disjointed nose in the air and avoid those who did not choose the same course.
Through this blog I see there are hard prices to pay blazing that new trail. There always are. Our country was settled by those driven to search for a new and unpopular path. In Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception, author Thom Hartmann cites that it was those indeed those gifted people who escaped the norm; searching for another way that caused North America to be discovered, explored, settled, and ultimately tamed.
When it’s all said and done I think we’re wired intellectually, spiritually and cosmically to be who we were meant to be. The choices we make on this trek are merely flavors. Pick A, B, C, or D. It is up to each of us to find our way.
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