I am always wrestling with something internally, like a potato-farming version of Jacob wrestling with Gawd. That bibble story always bothered me a great deal1, which there-by got me into trouble. “GOD CHEATED, WHY ARE WE FINE WITH THAT?”
What ever the answer might have really been, the answer I received was always some variation of the theme: Don’t ask questions don’t rock the boat who do you think you are why do you insist on embarrassing us in front of the community. Possibly including a veiled threat or two.
Explanations for divine interventions are rarely satisfying, and a lot of of life on this planet is managed in terms of not-so-divine interventions that one shouldn’t question: norms of social order, perhaps, or what one should be doing with one’s time on this planet.
These behaviors grew up at a time when life support was spare and hard-won, and the needs of kings was paramount. There is a certain kind of hardness in the wellspring of humanity that other creatures, and ourselves, find terrifying, and if it wasn’t so we wouldn’t balk and the gentle behaviors of a Buddhist monk as being radical, if not revolutionary. How dare you endeavor to be kind to everything, what the hell's wrong with you?
And recently I am wrestling with myself, again. I like to talk a big talk about universal basic incomes and people having the chance to do what they dreamed of doing before someone told them to earn a living, and so on. Middle Kid, who is almost twenty-one and still living with, the Parentals, desperately wants to make some sort of name for himself on something called Twitch, and this is why he is not going to advanced school or going to the job mine with the rest of us2.
And I am wrestling with myself on this. Over and over again in my head is a voice screaming GET A JOB ALREADY, FIND SOMETHING TO MAKE MONEY. YOU HAVE TO HAVE MONEY AND WE OLD FOLK WHO PAY FOR THIS SHANGRI-LAH YOU LIVE IN RENT-FREE AREN’T GETTING YOUNGER.
Wrestle Mania, that’s me, because that voice of Father’s and Grandfather’s of history, that’s not my voice. That’s the old voice, the hard voice, screaming there’s not enough, there’s not enough, when really there is. I know there is, I make models of Enough all the time, and sometimes their shape is unexpected. And that can be beautiful.
Darling Partner and I talk about what our lives might have been like if discernable encouragement had come our way at a younger age. Hypotheticals like that don’t really go anywhere but do provide plenty of wrestling material. If we embraced totalitarian historical leanings, would the Kid wonder forever if he could have been a contendah? The World Game apparatus isn’t in place yet to just let him pursue this on his own, but Partner and I, we’re here, now. And now might just be enough.
I mean, that’s not the ONLY bibble story that bothered me, but this one is pretty persistent.
To be fair, Eldest is working part-time on a kind of hippie glamping farm and Youngest wants to be an animator, so a Twitch personality isn’t really all that sideways for us. Teamwork makes the dreamwork, it’s just that our team is made of two, and dah bills, dey endless.
I read this backwards (paragraph by paragraph) because I'm weird. I am not sure if that has any relevance to anything. Just a side note.
"what our lives might have been like if discernable encouragement had come our way at a younger age".... that seems like a void not worth pondering. Yet I cut and pasted it here. Why?
apropos of nothing: have you watched the Dungeons and Dragons movie with Chris Pine and Michelle Rodrigues? Colin and I determined it was worthy of its name
"And now might just be enough." You just rang my chimes!