My Pen Mates,
I write the number 2 like my dad does. My tendency to squirrel away small amounts of money without necessarily accounting for the amount of the loot I inherited from my mother. No one in my family read as much as I did in my teens; I attribute that to having dorm mates who loved to talk about books. As an adult, I like to keep a neat kitchen counter while cooking; I'm certain I did not pick that up from anyone in my family (neatness or cooking). Relatively, I pay closer attention to my health, but that's because I was a sickly child and received a lot of medical and home care growing up. These things stick, although which and wherefore is somewhat random _ and the absorbed trait may have required mere moments of exposure, fleeting as I've come to realize.
In Teach, my preceding blog entry, I sought to inspire rather than merely educate. Here, I wish to understand what makes individual development insanely diverse, maddeningly complex, and critically important to analyze. As challenging as it is to lay out an operating principle in raising a family, all bets are off when internal family dynamics meets real world. Whatever agenda belies the core interest of a family, the skewing influence of the rest of society that each member encounters ultimately shapes the character of a normally developing adult (emphasis on normal development as a subtle exclusionary reference to physical/mental components which present more unique aspects of personal character growth). Constant exposure to a particular stimulus does alter behaviour and certain generational traits such as I described in the beginning do emerge down the line. But as a person comes to fill his/her shell as an individual, all experiences that served as prelude to his basic character allows a period of immersion and eventual absorption of selective traits that are linked together like a mutating character DNA.
In a flash, someone could pick up an interest, skill, or understanding -- seemingly without prior hint of proclivity for such. It does not come out of the blue; but all that came before served to prime the system for that moment when the "self" is ready to take off. Then there are those traits which takes years of wilful focus to accomplish, where the self is disciplined and directed towards a goal. Since not everyone is primed to stay the course in such endeavours, the positive outcomes minimally stick. It's a talent, genius, a blessing; yet through the closest analysis, we seldom account for those "accidents" that produce the outcome. The challenge of understanding the human condition and how good families raise bad children and vice-versa is that once a child becomes its own person, the choices he/she makes, whether voluntary or coerced, is ever conditionally co-opted by the choices and influences of others. Multiple exposure to this dynamic of choice and accidents create, reveal, erase, or reinforce pathways which an individual ultimately follows. Given the variety of thoughts and emotions involved, it's not surprising that some identify their courses early, some come to it by happenstance, and others never really find their path. That's not to say that lives are consummated or wasted either way; people can find joy or misery in any condition. The world is filled with seekers, wait-and-see-ers, and the never-care-ers. But hope resides in the heart that sees the "self", then respects the rest of the world.
Mon
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