Me and the world (written in Barcelona 05/2008)
When I was younger, we lived in a smaller neighborhood in Woodstock closer to the rural parts of Cherokee. We had a large yard with a creek that ran underneath the driveway before heading into a pasture that sat adjacent to our lot. My mom was often busy taking care of the twins and running a day-care out of our house. It was more than a full-time job. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time wandering around on my own. Once in a blue moon, I’d have the company of a friend, but in all honesty, I didn’t have too many friends. I just didn’t get along well with other kids my age.
I remember fairly clearly days spent outside when the weather was nice. The sun was hot, and the air was humid–always typical of Georgia. One of my favorite things to do was play in the creek. While playing in the creek, I felt that it’d be nice to have a place to swim. The creek was never deep enough to swim in. I began to formulate a plan. There were several large rocks around and plenty of mud. I put two and two together and began constructing a dam. Working on my dam became one of my favorite things to do. I’d spent long hours moving heavy rocks and packing them down with mud. Although, I don’t think I ever quite stopped up enough water to swim in before a large storm would come and sweep everything away. It never really bothered me when this happened though. I’d just rebuild it.
Looking back on it, I don’t think finishing the dam was all that important to me. I think my enjoyment came from the mystique of exploring and testing my environment. When you’re young, everything is so mysterious. You can’t really do anything without figuring something else out first. I was so absorbed in learning how to manipulate my environment and what my boundaries were that I often lost sight of the ultimate goal I had set out to achieve. Those days were all about me, by myself, moving objects, changing my world, understanding what I could achieve with my own two hands.
In this context, it’s understandable that my other most memorable activities included digging holes (more manipulation–I had this dream of an underground clubhouse) and climbing trees (conquering my environment and exploring my limitations.)
Today, years and years later, here I am still building dams and climbing trees. I’ve become a bit more sophisticated in the way I manipulate my world maybe, but it’s still that same old model: me and the world. This model has two entities and an interface. “Me” is completely interior while “the world” is completely exterior, and the interface is what I’ve always been exploring. My ultimate goal in life has become legacy–I want to make something huge, something that will always be remembered (a huge dam perhaps?).
There’s a problem with my model though. It’s always been two separate entities: me and the world. It’s always been me, the young boy by himself getting a feel for nature in the heat of the summer, and the world, a ball of clay that I’ve slowly been learning how to mold and shape. The problem here is easy to see. Where do people factor in? You could say that people are part of my world, my ball of clay, along with ideas and things, but let’s consider the model of someone who may have grown up in a more social environment. What might their model be? Their reality may be broken down into more than just two entities (i.e. me and the world). They may have to break things down in a more complex fashion. For example, their “me” may consist of themselves, close friends and family, and their world, having been seen through a different filter because of an alternate idea of “me”, may be something more complex that has to be broken down into several different entities. Their idea of the world wasn’t simply a ball of clay that they were slowly squeezing and molding on their own. Their idea of the world may be something more along the lines of a meal that their idea of “me” was cooking but no one individual quite knew the recipe for. Their exploration of the world was not simply internal. It was shared heavily with others (their close friends and family).
I feel like these people will lead happier lives than someone like me. They’ll understand things like social responsibility and the difference one can make with a simple kind gesture better than I ever will. The primary difference between someone with a model like mine and the one I just discussed is probably in that “ultimate goal in life” I talked about earlier. I’ll always be fruitlessly sculpting that ball of clay on my own. While their lives, having been enriched by the wisdom of others, will probably be guided by a consciousness that understands the fortitude of the abstract and the virtue of a collective legacy shared with others.
My sad realization is that my guiding star is selfish, and it’s so deeply ingrained, going all the way back to my early childhood, that’s it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to abandon.
An old fable (written 05/2005)
A young boy with a pale face, sand-colored hair and bare feet walks down a beaten path to meet an old friend. He knows that the travelers he sees on the path from time to time think of him as naïve and ignorant to the world. However, they are all mistaken. His old friend has taught him more about life than any traveler down the beaten path could ever know.
The boy smiles with anticipation as he steps onto a very narrow path that leads into a thick forest that only he is familiar with. He passes ferns that are as large as elephants and purple moss that is as soft as velvet. A mist hangs in the air, but this does not seem to startle the boy; he has been here many times before. He hurries forward wondering what his old friend will show him today.
The boy stops very abruptly and stares at the ground. There crawling on the narrow, overgrown path is the most grotesque beetle the boy has ever seen. He flinches as the beetle creeps closer to him with its hooked nose pointing in his direction and its bloated body dragging on the ground, leaving a small track mark in the dirt. Where the beetle crawls, there are no other animals-not even other insects. The boy thinks to himself that even mindless animals know better than to come close to this terrible creature.
As the beetle begins to crawl a little too close, the boy begins to walk away. However, as he turns, the boy realizes what it is that the beetle is racing towards. A large redwood looms overhead. The boy decides that it has to be the largest he has ever seen. The boy stands, gazing in astonishment, as a very goal-oriented beetle makes its way, faster and faster, toward the giant redwood. It then ascends with such an inspiring drive that the boy can do nothing but stand there with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. As the beetle ascends the tree, its body begins to pulse. The beetle becomes larger and larger as it ascends the tree until finally its entire body begins to take on a whole new shape. The boy shakes his head in disbelief. When he directs his stare back to the tree tops, a gigantic, fearsome red tailed hawk is staring back at him with a look as if to say, I told you so.
The boy stumbles off pondering what he has just seen as the sun begins to set. He has not gone very far when an owl sitting high above the forest floor begins to question him. “Who?” the owl asks. It wants to know what business the boy has in its domain. Knowing from previous experience that owls are often too lazy to defend their territory, the boy thinks it will be best just to ignore the nosey owl. The owl seems quite enraged by this. It begins to puff up its feathers and raise its voice. “Who?!” The boy simply shrugs and keeps walking. The owl then decides it is time to take action. Realizing he has made a terrible mistake the boy frantically tries to take cover as the owl swoops down from its perch. Suddenly, a loud popping noise echoes through the forest. The boy looks up dumbfounded at a puff of feathers still hanging in the air. A second later, he feels something tugging at his pant leg. He gazes down to find a little, helpless rat pulling on the cuff of his pants. It seems to yell quietly with a shrill voice, “Who!? Who?! Who?!” The boy chuckles and kicks the rat away. He then walks on.
As the boy makes his way down the narrow, overgrown path, he reflects on the events that have just taken place. What was it that his old friend was trying to tell him? He decides that he had better spend a little bit more time in the forest before heading home. He walks on for what he feels is about an hour and decides that it is getting late. He picks a long piece of grass out of the ground, puts it between his lips and heads home. He chews the wild onion sprout and hangs his head looking mildly disappointed that he was unable to make sense of what had taken place.
As the boy nears the intersection of the narrow, overgrown trail and the beaten path, he hears a sort of scratching sound in the trees. He looks up to find an animal about halfway up a large tree that he recognizes from the nature books he has read as a small child. It’s a sloth! He tells himself. He thinks of this as a bit odd once he remembers that the sloth is generally only found in rain forests and certainly not in the back woods of the west coast. The boy decides to wait a while to see if the sloth will pop, pulse or maybe turn into a duck-billed platypus. After watching the sloth move up and down the tree a few feet for what seems like hours, the boy concludes that nothing is going to happen. However, he begins to realize something. Though it moves incredibly slow and never seems to get very far without changing direction, the sloth appears to be content. The boy decides that this is because the sloth is not slow but wise. He does not seek out the next branch. He merely reaches out and grabs it when the time comes.
As everything begins to fall into place within his mind, the boy trots home with a smile on his face and a bounce in his step.