I had this image of myself yesterday of behaving like, acting like Uncle Mike. It's like I'm (unknowingly) living out the programming of my "ancestors." This is an idea that I encountered in Thich Nhat Hahn before, an appreciation of unknown constraints on your behavior that come to you from "ancestors."
The constraints could be DNA, a way of perceiving things.
The constraints could also be the trauma/support you recieved from your parents -- the things passed down, the phrases, the behaviors, the idea of what to pay attention to...
Also, I recently thought of a line chart of a life (my life) where the Y-axis is "interestingness" and the X-axis is years. There must be peaks and valleys in the line chart. There must be spikes and flat lines.
And if you think... well, maybe one peak was my year spent abroad. OK... well, then, how did THAT come to be? I got that idea from somewhere, I went to a school that made study abroad pretty cheap, I was "allowed" to go. But I was also conditioned somewhere/somehow to value doing something like that.
It's not hard to considered my 20-year old self as "constrained" or "conditioned." Why would I be different now?
I'm thinking now of a teacher at work, middle age has tightened, hardened her. The extraneous, the soft has fallen away, leaving a skeleton of things that were already there. I'm imagining that that's her genetic/familial destiny coming through.
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