What does it mean
when the best outcome is to STAY THE SAME?
I remember my mother and father, both in their own ways, adding to the pressure I felt to change the world. It was not enough to have work, family, home…for special children, how it got translated, the goal was to change the world or fail at life’s mission.
I am not exactly sure how this edict was proclaimed, how I carried that for so many years, to this very day in fact. Was it implicit in my rearing? Spoken? Unspoken? I think it was perhaps unspoken— and something we picked up to make my mother’s life mean more than her fractured dreams. She had “given it all up” for us children.
And then there was my dad. Nothing was ever good enough. The consummate professional. He made me feel inconsequential to want to fix up the barn and put on a show. Sometimes I think about my parents approval. I suppose I received it from my mother but not my father, but the few crumbs left to me by my father seemed to stretch much further. Mostly it was a muted disinterest at best and outright condemnation at its most insistent.
I have attempted to work past being second-rate in a family of go-getters. Geniuses and winners.
Now I am advancing in my lifespan, I will say I am not exactly sold on the idea of success. Look what success means today! Lying, cheating, stealing, no ethics, barely a classical education in sight, and resistance to anything resembling humility or quality. The very institutions that we all flocked to and imagined the glorious inclusion into, now wrecked by serious greed and corruption knocking out every single core value that artists and thinkers are supposed to exhibit.
To think that all progress is really nothing but re-gress, the worst most basic liars and thieves in charge of everything.
How could anyone’s grandparents recognize the state of things. They would say, ok we changed our minds. No! to progress. No! to technology. No to AI. NO! NO! NO! Let’s go back to mediocre and wager on everything staying the same.
Pretend it is a poker game and everyone just STAY.
No more bets for now.