It's been fun blogger, but I've matured. My tastes have outgrown you. Okay that's not true, but how else do I say this? It's not you blogger, it's me.
I'm not sure I'm even a "blogger", because every month or quarter is hardly a blog. I do like to write down thoughts here and there, and now I'll be doing it here:
Every once and again a certain part of our culture becomes odd to me. Kind of like when you look at a word too many times and eventually it starts to look like you've never seen that word. It is so familiar that at once it becomes strangely unfamiliar. Or it could be likened to when you stare at a bright light too long and then look away, it becomes the contrasted foreground to your vision. So here's my latest:
The manner in which we've chosen to age segregate our children, particularly in school. I realized that for me, this sort of grouping has permeated a larger part of my social construct than I previously thought. In kindergarten, the 2nd graders were big mean giants, and in 6th grade (for me jr. high was 7th -8th) you were on the top of the elementary world, ready to squash any of your minions that got out of line. Freshman are crap, in both high school and college, and so on.
Not a big deal right? Just part of our culture. Now try thinking about a few people you've kept in touch with that were older than you in high school or college, maybe even by just one year. Now try to remember somebody one year younger. Have these slight variants in age created larger variants in perception?
This all hit me watching Layla (5) interact with some neighborhood kids. She's way ahead of her age in intelligence, but perhaps on par with her peers in emotional maturity. This creates a shift in how she interacts with others, and how others perceive her. She naturally gravitates toward the older crowd, because she talks like them, and they talk like her. But then she's constantly below the others in terms of this unspoken American caste system, this segregation by grade. "Oh you're in kindergarten?!?" *eyes roll*
Some of this plays into the (very difficult for me) decision to home school her. We're finding that our little humans do not fit very well into the boxes that have been set out for them.
People already have a natural tendency to compartmentalize, group and sort. And we do this with the people around us so that we have a world view that is mentally manageable. However, I wonder if in setting up our educational system with so many horizontal rungs to climb, we're encouraging and unknowingly teaching a disproportionate amount of exclusion and segregation. I wonder if a more organic approach to learning could be achieved, something much more inclusive along subject matter and aptitude, instead of age and graduation.
Yesterday I was helping the girls ride around the park. Layla on her Barbie bike (finally got around to fixing the tires), and Paisley sporting the new princess scooter she got for Christmas. They love love love their "bikes". Reminded me of how much I rode them when I was a kid.
Most of the time, as they rode around the giant circle, they were as far apart from each other as possible. Round and round, and they each kept asking for help. So back and forth across the circle I went, earning father points with each trek. They were looking to me for direction, stability, and safety. I was being a good father. And I could feel it. With each pedal or push, they were each getting the hang of it. We were having a good time.
In the middle of this a sadness hit me. Hit me hard, out of nowhere. I thought about the day I would die. Maybe it would come soon, maybe not for a long time. Either way, someday they would lose the ability to directly receive advice and love from their father. And it has become obvious to me lately how important a father is for a girl, especially when she is little. But what caused the sorrow, however, was not my death. It was this notion I couldn't shake: that the closer we become, the harder that this loss will be for them. I literally felt that the better father I would be in their lifetime, the harder it will someday be for them to lose me.
Of course as I write this, I worry that it sounds incredibly conceded. As if my relationship to them is absolutely everything important in their lives. Which of course it is not. But these were the feelings as they were coming.
I think two things are going on: one, as a father, I would like to shield and protect them from any major emotional distresses (which of course is impossible to do). And two, I have an issue with the finality of death.
I want to give them a good family life and a good relationship with their father and mother. Maybe I underestimate the importance of these things regardless of their eventual end. I still can't shake the feeling.
The good news is that my instinct is stronger than this crazy head of mine, and I would not change anything about our bike ride in the park. And I look forward to many, many more.
This is the most coherent and concise explanation of why people are attracted to conspiracy theory I've found. And I've always wondered why a more than expected percentage of people lean this direction. Well here you go...
Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.
What an odd thing this is. So constant, so silent, so driving. I'm becoming fascinated with this thing I've always taken for granted.
On one hand it's ruthless, allowing none to escape its eventual fatal grasp. On the other it provides perspective, healing, peace. It provides the reference for rhythms that become music, and it's a canvas on which seasons are splashed. Try as we might, we cannot slow it nor hurry it.
It provides the logic by which one event is able to happen after another. This never changes or reverses. And once those two events are related this way, they are always and forever set in stone. She's an endless zipper, consistently bringing events together never to be separated. We can only hope peer back at them through the blurry lenses of memory.
However, there are problems with the way we understand entropy, such as whether our universe is closed or open, and it freaks me out a bit to be honest. We can't fully or physically explain why time has an unchanging direction, highlighting the "now" that defines all of our collective consciousness' at once.
Isn't weird that when we try to grasp even the most basic of principles, such as time, we open our hands and find that they have escaped our understanding, albeit more narrowly each time? This is a pillar for me in my faith: that God is and has created things that are out of our grasp.
