Growing up

Question of the Day, July 17, 2011 – Growing up

Thinking back to your childhood and then forwards towards adulthood, what was the hardest thing about growing up?

Learning to accept what is.
Learning to give up the notion of right and wrong, and simply accept reality as it is, and as it isn’t, then make my choices to do what I can to create it as seems appropriate.

For so long I was wedded to the notion of right; and judged so many and so much as being wrong.

Now that I can accept what is, most of “hard” has gone.
Now there is simply choice and consequence.
Now there is either taking a stand for possibility, or accepting the consequences of not doing so.

Slowly – the conversations around me are changing.

[followed by]

Hi Alluvja, Judi, Sun et al

For about 40 years much of my childhood was my definition of hell, being teased, being beaten, being without friends, being small, deformed, different, outcast ….

It has only been in the last 15 years or so that I have started to recognise what has resulted from those experiences; and have come to appreciate the old Buddhist saying “It is never too late to have a great life”.

Now, today, I can appreciate many things about me that could not have come about, except via the experiences of my childhood and subsequent growth.

That appreciation in no way condones the bullying actions, the psychopathic torture, etc that happened – it simply acknowledges and accepts that which has given me the being that I have; and the ability to empathise with so many different experiences in life – a depth of compassion that I doubt I could have acquired by any other means.

I could so easily have been any of my torturers, had my situation, my experience, my genetics, been just a little bit different from what it was.

This realisation has taken me a long time. As I have said many times, sometimes intelligence is not necessarily an advantage, because it allows us to defend beliefs that are essentially indefensible – but with our intelligence we can build walls with words far more quickly than others of less intelligence can tear them down, or expose the fallacies at their bases.