Good Morning Jacob...

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 12 January

Genius can afford to be eccentric

Good Morning Jacob…

The sun doesn’t rise unless there’s someone there to see it.  You can’t ignore a big production and expect it to take place without the fanfare of appreciation, even if it’s only a birdbrain rooster clearing its throat.  That’s the way the universe works.  Prove me wrong if you don’t believe it.  Could you hand me that?  I believe it’s my drink.

I was beyond remembering the night before.  Whatever happened never took its required place in my memory.  Once I awoke the following morning the first thing I did was go to the window and see if my car was there.  Was it in one piece?  And what of the people I made myself known to the prior evening?  I should prepare my apologies, whatever they might need to be.  I could have done or said most anything imaginable.  My sober mind would have cringed at my insulting and boorish manner, but drunk, I would have considered my remarks stringently witty, if not downright welcomed for being so obviously necessary.

I put down the drink a long time ago and the chaos of my life has been lifted but the nature of my personality remains fiercely intact.  It’s just better caged.  That’s good enough for me.  I’m not working on changing who it is I am.  It would be like substituting someone else’s version of life for mine and I don’t see that a winning point.  We respect others while remaining true to our essential nature.  People aren’t required to accept our authentic selves but we do ourselves a favor by limiting our real friendships to those that truly know us.  We tend to the business of living our life as best we can and leave to society how they choose to value our contribution. 

Governments are always busy mediating the boundaries that protect individual rights while ensuring the stability of society.  Culture, history and contemporary context all help determine the extent of our freedom to pursue our desires and promote our beliefs.  We make ourselves known, letting others observe and judge for themselves the validity of our chosen practices.  Unless the spirit of the individual is repressed this scenario will make for a noisy affair.  The many conflicting points of view will be passionately debated.  What we have created in a healthy society is a marketplace of individual ideas endlessly seeking validation.

How annoying it can be to hear so many arguments for ways of living that go against my own common sense.  I smother my outrage.  It’s quite apparent to me the life I’ve chosen for myself has very little appeal for the vast majority of the people around me.  Should I take offense to this?  Why?  Fortunately we are not all shaped from the same cookie cutter.  A society made exclusively of people like me would soon starve.  My attitudes and skills are at best a fringe benefit to the population of this tribe.  There is need for very few people like me.  But it is good that I am represented because I believe diversity is fundamental to human success.   Look at all the niches human society fills.  We didn’t get to where we are by practicing herd behavior. 

We all have traits clearly meant for us and they do not transfer well to those we know.  This has a lot to do with what it means to be human.  Not everything about us is admirably polished on close examination.  We have our quirks.  They can be surprisingly useful.  Every individual known to history has oddities that are familiar to all.  They may seem laughable at times but I suspect our peculiarities are often unrecognized contributors, instrumental in making for brilliant and heroic acts.

Love,

           Dad

Good Morning Jacob...

Letter to my Son
Sunday, 1 September

Human Artifact

Good Morning Jacob…

There’s almost no tissue between the forehead and the bone of the skull.  In fact, the head is the skull’s form barely concealed beneath the soft tissue of the face’s gentle expression.  Our skeletal grin reveals itself when our full, rosy lips part to express our pleasure.  Our sparkling eyes are extensions of our brain, specialized nervous tissue that pushes its way through boney passages to take in the light that bathes our surface.  On the other hand, the musculature of our torso and limbs more completely conceals the mechanical nature of our structure.  We are an assemblage of bones held in place by a network of muscles that act as pulleys and torsion bars so that we aren’t stuck in one spot, like a plant, our entire life. 

We are built up around a long central tube that must continually be replenished with objects we ingest from our surroundings.  Our inner workings extract from these once living articles their energy potential for our own use, so that we can sustain our own life’s mission.  Of course, that mission varies greatly from individual to individual depending upon the nature of our desires, the strength of our ambition and our intellectual and physical potential. 

This, then, is a rough beginning - describing each of us as individual expressions of an organism made solely of bone, tissue, and a remarkably intricate nervous system.  You and I, as mere individuals of this species, have goals limited to preserving our own existence if we are without the benefit that group intelligence provides us.  This is a remarkable resource that we might as well call culture.  It provides each of us with memory that exceeds our own in both time and spatial capacity.  It gives us a lexicon of standardized symbols we can use to share both ideas and the knowledge we acquire from our own experiences.  The commonalities we share in being part of this one culture enable us to behave as though we are all part of an extended family.  Generally speaking, we intuitively understand each other when it comes to basic motivations and we find it preferable for our own welfare to work in cooperation with one another. 

Our group behaves like any complex organism and divides into specialized parts that separately contribute to the welfare of the whole.  Ability and inclination enable a few individuals to act as the brain – providing direction, after weighing the potential benefits and dangers of various options.  Many individuals set about collecting the resources needed to maintain the group’s physical welfare.  Some people within the group provide the muscle necessary to encourage a common purpose among our members.  They are also vital in discouraging harmful acts taken against us by other groups and in helping to settle disputes that may actually arise. 

Harmony among the various elements of the group is never to be taken for granted.  Governance is still an art form dependent upon the availability of individuals displaying both wisdom and the talent of leadership.  The quality of education reflects the shifting popularity of cultural values.  The socialization of the individual to accept an identity greater than self is never complete… and thankfully so.  We are each in pursuit of dreams of a personal nature and we stubbornly resist homogenizing group thought.  There will always be a healthy inclination to subvert culture so long as we remain human.  We can all be artists busy fabricating our own personal destiny while still responding to the call of cultural values and the needs of the group. 

How inconvenient, though, it can all be.  What stupid decisions we sometimes make as individuals.  Didn’t I learn anything in school?  I wasn’t brought up to be this way.  I readily admit my mistakes are of my own unique contrivance; as are yours.  It’s about testing conventional thought.  Sometimes we get it right thinking on our own.  Much of what we do as individual humans is worth the trouble we cause to this culturally oiled mechanism that is society… civilization.  It’s what we need to do to keep life vital.  So keep it up.

Love,

           Dad