DAY SIX

What is it about us human beings that makes us have to relive some of the same mistakes generation after generation? Wouldn’t you think that if something bad happened to my father and he told me about it or warned me about it, that I would avoid that trap.

It sounds logical but for some strange reason life doesn’t work that way.
I mean how many of you have children or younger brothers and sisters or grand children or somebody younger than you that are just doomed to repeat the same failures in marriage, love, sex, drugs and rock & roll that many of us went through?

What is it about youth that makes it impossible to believe that churning milk long enough turns it into butter whether you want it to or not.  Same thing with poor lifestyle choices: they get you into places you don't like being. 

How many times do we hear young people, or how many times when we were young people, did we say or believe: “Oh that won’t happen to me!”

“Oh yes, Betty is an alcoholic but that will never happen to me...bartender one more round!”

“Tommy was a drug addict but I can shoot up that heroin or take a little meth and nothing will happen to me…hand me the bag…”

Yeah and we’re all going to live forever and we can live any lifestyle we choose and we’ll always stay perpetually young. Now this would be an instance where a fairy tale rather than bringing clarity to reality would actually cloud good judgment.

Of course nobody actually believes this but try to find the one young person in a thousand that actually does something about it without being forced by some circumstance to change?

I was NOT that young person…at least not before I turned 21 anyway. I could do anything to my body and mind and nothing was going to happen to me.

And I know why it was that way for me. I knew that things I did were wrong and I knew what the right things were to do but I just didn’t want to change. I mean my younger self was more than willing to ruin things for my older self if it meant I could have a little more fun.

What’s really intriguing is to realize that this is actually not just a condition of youth but it’s a systemic problem for everyone their entire lives. Listen to how this man describes the condition:

For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I…For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

His name was Saul of Tarsus and he is one of the writers of the Bible, specifically The New Testament.

If we’re all subject to like passions and our natural course is to be contradictory and self destructive then how can any of us escape?

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr