Im-Preach You

Dear J-

Whole segments of the population feel like they’re under cultural attack. When you see the world in terms of absolutes, winners and losers, pretty much everything starts looking like a race with judgment flying all around you. If you get this then I need that. No. Doesn’t always work that way. I sometimes forget that if we share what we have we all get more. You get what you give. What you put into it is doubly returned. Triply. Folks can see what effort you sink into it, and they’re going to respond accordingly. Instead of asking why me, the better thing to ask would be why am I this way, and how can I bring others around to my point of view.

I suppose the urge to proselytize is embedded deeply within our psyches; maybe it’s only the fear of being left alone but it’s a valid point nonetheless. It must be as instinctive as the urge to reproduce, but there’s more than just your baser instincts at work after all. Instinct and reaction without reason don’t fulfill any lofty goals or higher callings; perhaps we’re looking to save each other, which makes it ironic that we’re so fiercely protective of our rights to not change our ways. Is this better? It’s different, which is saying perhaps a million things that we might not have understood before. Different requires change, and change is uncertain, so perhaps we react with fear instead.

How many years have passed since high school? Did we know everything we needed when we walked across that stage? It has been now twenty-two years; more time has passed outside our primary and secondary educations than we spent within it, and whole galaxies and universes have been wrought from the very fabric of our bodies since then (yes, children). The people you knew have had a whole lifetime of change since then, and while I was curious to know what they might have been up to over the past twenty years, it wasn’t enough to overcome my fear of those changes, having sampled even just five or ten years of that delta to see impossible shifts and changes.

Mike