I am the oldest of four brothers all now long past our educational backgrounds and well into our professions and families. If you are a people-watcher or a family-liver you know that personalities seep when families get together in a heap.
Up to Greenville I went for my 51st birthday where my widowed mom had just moved into an exquisite house, a house unlike the genre stamped through our family’s generations. What’s more her property adjoins that of my youngest brother allowing his kids to go over the hill and through the woods to grandma’s house.
Long have I heard my wife teach our kids that comparison is a trap, and I agree with her. Thing is, agreeing is not the same things as keeping one’s foot out of the trap, is it? So, when my eye-surgeon-self shows up amongst my non-eye-surgeon family members and their zone seems to one-up mine, well, it turns out that comparison has a way of happening. That traps because it has a way of dampening, and dampening ain’t vacationing.
Recovering
The problem solver part of my touts, “I need to fix this. I can afford it.” Throw those ideas onto life’s hot skillet and some sizzle-smoke wisdom will come up from the stove: “Money won’t really fix what you are experiencing.” That message is fuzzy but still the letters are in the steam; the ideas are in the smell.
So, “What is going on?” tromps my get-out-of-the-funk recovery hunt. “You aren’t really supposed to go to mom’s house, brother’s house and get stuck in a bad place are you?” Nope, but like the child’s game of hide-and-seek life gets encrusted with a certain level of ready-or-not-here-I-come type barnacles that affect how our ship sails.
In order to recover from this pinch I got off alone by myself, broke off a barnacle or two and squeezed them a little. What would come out? What could I learn by digging through my mind-stymie. The most important saltiness in the squeezed out seawater went a bit like this: We all come to our lives at different times, with different resources, and different personalities. Those differences unfold lives that are, well, different but still effect ceratin ends, certain outcomes.
My own nuclear family is and has been at a very good place. My brother’s and mother’s families arrived at their good place with some overlap with me but with a myriad of other non-overlappings. Exposure to others, in the family and out, inflects our futures, but it does not alter the roots which are way back yonder. There is a very plain explanation for the why of my now, the shape of my economic unfolding. It is super-crucial to accept those and not somehow try to demand my present must be different or be discontentedly moody because it cannot be. So those are helpful “recoveryials.”
Reading
My cerebral existence auto-links novels (just finished book two of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive and am two-thirds of the way through Paulette Jiles’ Simon the Fiddler), music (we listened to Kanye West’s Donda on the way to Greenville), non-fiction, and current events on the world scope (Afghanistan, COVID, diversity, gender fluidity, defund the police, etc.) and my-scope.
On my non-fiction scene has been a very slow plod through a book Theodore Roszak gave a rather gulpy title: Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society. With a name like that why would one read it? Well, the short answer is that Steve Garber in his amazing work, Visions of Vocation, got my intrigue up by Roszak references. So graveling title or not, I have been working hard at Wasteland. To my vacation-dampened-notions came the following sentence.
“…But they purchase their purity by resort to an unbecoming historical amnesia; and turning a blind eye to the truth never buys real innocence.” (page 194)
“Historical amnesia” rapidly auto-linked to my vacation-that-wasn’t. Through comparison it airbag-inflated up in front of my eyes. Thankfully airbags don’t stay inflated and once tamped back down the rearview mirror came into view and the trails and trials, the highways and sometimes rutted by-ways that led to my good now came back to view.
Unfortunately, the rearview mirror of hindsight does not always calm the heart. That requires the strain of pushing hard and praying hard against the amnesia boxes in my head. It might seem out of the blue to inject prayer here, but God helps if one calls upon the one true God and asks for the right kind of things. All religions tell you where you are dirty, but as best I can tell only Christianity teaches us that God will reach out and help clean up your dirty spots. So prayer, some mental kicking, and the tincture of time wrested those barnacles off the hull of my ship. Smooth sailing is better.
Many more puddles of seawater could be squeezed from the barnacles of the American political climate, Academia, historical amnesia and attempts at innocence. Maybe I will come to those another time.
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