Pages from the Diary of a Quiet Boy (II): Lost In the Woods?

A loose continuation of some ideas I started working on back in the spring... looking backwards to my earlier days...

Coming out of the Woods...

It has been a busy and stressful couple of weeks... and I have been wondering quietly if we're ever going to come out of the woods... and this morning, I stood outside in the wind, watching leaves blow around and thinking about being a kid.

As a kid, I would stand out in the wind, watching the leaves-- and often I would ride my bike several miles away and walk into the woods where it was only me, and the woods, and the wind.

There was a sense of peace in that.

I knew that when I was there in the woods, nobody would ask me to do anything, nobody would tell me what to be, nobody would require me to "be something" as part of whatever necessary infrastructure they needed in order to make their reality real.

In the woods, nobody would tell me what I was feeling, even though it wasn't actually what I was feeling.

Being the Weird Kid

Because I was a "weird kid" (I suppose) people felt compelled to attribute more "acceptable" emotional states to me, and to overlay them on my reality because it made them uncomfortable that I was more at home standing in the woods watching leaves, than playing ball with my peers. Or even drawing, or playing music.

"That's creepy," they'd say... but never asking whether I was happy and at peace, watching leaves.

They missed the point that in the presence of others I always felt like some kind of "lab rat" to be observed and gauged against some metric of "acceptable behavior" that clearly was different from the behavior I was choosing.

Even 50 years later, I ponder the motivations of humans.

"I Need You to Be Like Me... Or Else!"

I especially ponder the part in which so many people seem trapped in paradigms that involve not so much just them "being themselves," but involve this toxic component of coercion and manipulation in which their "being themselves" is heavily contingent on other people being specific puzzle pieces in their tapestry of reality.

I watch it everywhere: Politics, Religion, Philosophy...

For example, it's not enough to simply be free to be "a Christian," or "a Libertarian" or "a Leader;" these things are so often heavily dependent on forcing others to be the same, in some fashion.

In my mind, I keep coming back to the Biblical "lion lays with the lamb" and it seems so impossible... because it feels more like all the "Lions" of the world want to convert the lambs to lions, and vice-versa. 

So we have people living in paradigms that are dependent on only laying down arms-- physical, philosophical, psychological-- when others are "like us;" but never allowing them to simply coexist, as themselves.

Towards a Better World...?

How can we ever hope to create a "better world" if that better world is eternally contingent on eradicating or manipulating those who don't see the world as we do?

I stood outside in the cold wind, thinking about how I really felt more comfortable with the blowing leaves in the woods, where there were no people. There was a stillness there; a peace. There were no fighting adults, diminishing each other because someone had used the letter "A" too often.

I thought those same thoughts when I was seven, eight, twelve, eighteen... standing in the woods, trying to understand why I felt so pushed in directions that were not really mine... "because that's what you need to do, to get along." I thought "getting along" meant cooperation and compromise, not coercion...

I am still pondering that question, 50 years later...

How About You? Did you have certain questions as a kid... that remain "questions" years and decades later? Are there aspects of human motivation that baffle you? Does it strike you that a lot of folks are not happy "having an opinion," they must also force that opinion on others? How does that work, for the future of the World? Leave a comment-- share your experiences and feedback-- be part of the conversation!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Published 20171021 17:11 PDT