This, on Facebook, inspired what I wrote below.
“Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Book: Culture and Value [ad] https://amzn.to/3VUOWI4)
(Art: Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt)”
School is the wrong environment for children, where they - we - do not satisfy curiosity, which is how we learn naturally and quickly and fall in love with life.
School is a trauma, because we are banished by family and quiver among strangers and do what everyone else does, to get along, to learn the ways, and never choose what to do. The thing that makes us human, that makes us free and bold and unleashes our natural power - choosing - we don't get to do. By not choosing how we will spend our day, we become not humans but slaves. By pursuing good grades for good jobs, we get good at being slaves. And the most scared can become the most vicious and competitive and rise to the top in the hierarchy that school is and in the hierarchies that school grooms us for.
Or we rebel by not caring, emotional and psychological suicide, and become no threat to the powers-that-be or their systems. Or we rebel with violence, against ourselves with piercings and tattoos or drugs and alcohol, or against each other and become valuable to the state-corporate partners as receivers of medication or as prisoners.
Mercifully, most of us get enough love from random encounters, if not at home, to survive. There are lots of good people out there. But the despair and addictions and crimes and confusion and suicides that are rising should concern us all. Especially when books bulge with remedies, especially the remedy of learning how to parent yourself. To mom yourself with comfort and love and soothing and healing and rest. So you always know you belong, which gives you the greatest sense of yourself and the okayness of life. And to dad yourself with encouragement and confidence and challenges and adventures, so you learn how to fail and learn from your failures. Learn how to have fun and work well with others. Learn how to not take yourself so seriously. Learn that life is a game that you win by playing, not by keeping score. Not by beating others. By loving each moment and everyone in it as yourself. Loving each moment from here through eternity because no moment is better than any other.
File under "Know Thyself," the project we're all engaged in, some consciously, some not.
I resonate with this. Born in 1942, I had that freedom and that security to see my life as an adventure designed for me alone. And trusted that others had the same. I’m 82. It’s been a wonderful rich ride!!
A Canadian Grandma