By David Robb ——Bio and Archives--March 31, 2023
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Sounds great doesn't it. Free as a bird! Free to go anywhere, do anything, be anything, whatever your heart desires! For many people today, perhaps even most, that sounds like a prescription for hell. They find themselves lost in a dark forest of choices, a forest filled with danger and traps, without paths or guideposts, where you must travel because you can't stay where you are.
For over two generations now, we have been told that there are no absolutes, no hard standards of right and wrong, that all our previous guides are obsolete and restrictive, and even inappropriate. Everything is situational and subjective and relative and there are no firm rules. Standards for behavior, social norms, and even laws are oppressive and unfair and racist and are to be discarded, we are instructed, by those who claim to have a deep awareness of such matters.
People need boundaries. They need to know where it is safe to go, and where the edges are, beyond which they travel at peril. Boundaries are often seen as impediments and arbitrary limits, and even as punishments. Sometimes they are. More often, though, they are the guardrails of our lives, the indications of what is good, and what is harmful, of what will make our lives successful and happy, and what leads to misery and defeat.
Children (and adults) look and learn
Parents need to realize that children are always watching. They are especially sensitive to how well the parent's actions match their words. A parent that acknowledges when they are wrong and takes meaningful action to do better teaches a far more powerful lesson than a parent who takes a "do as I say, not as I do" approach.
When I write of "parents" I also mean anyone in a position of power and authority. Government officials who ask for our trust and then proceed to violate that trust, who demand our honesty but who then lie and cheat to preserve power, who issue arbitrary edicts that they do not follow themselves, who fail to listen when their acts do more harm than good all fail to appreciate the true lessons they give. Imagine their surprise when they are not trusted, believed, or obeyed and find that their only recourse is to raw power which just makes things worse.
People, especially children and teenagers will push parental boundaries to test a parent's love for them. Imagine a child who comes to their parents to say "I've decided I want a lifestyle of hard drug use, promiscuous sex, and loud, angry music". Imagine a parent's response of "honey, you know we love you, and while we disagree with your choices, we will respect your wishes and support you however we can." What did the child learn about love? What did they learn about how much their parents cared for them?
Where were the boundaries that guide good choices? Where were the parents who could say "Because we love you, and because we believe those choices will lead you to great unhappiness and an early death, we will oppose them, set boundaries for you, and work with you to develop good choices for your life."?
Not born with a road map
Kids today, cast into the world, look around and see people dropping dead in the streets from drugs, others living in homeless camps, or simply leading lives of quiet despair not knowing how to live. All around them they see adults who make bad choices and who cannot seem to connect their unhappiness with their actions. They see people blaming others, their circumstances, society, poor education, other races, corporations, capitalism, their own parents - essentially anything but themselves and their own failings.
Instead of observing how people confront adversity and work to overcome it, these kids have no models for how to draw upon their own resources to learn and grow and turn failure into success. They have no well of wisdom to draw strength and ideas from. Instead, they end up floundering from one mistake to the next, not knowing how to break free.
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Modern society has gone far toward devaluing traditional wisdom but provides nothing in its place. Whatever one might think of theology, Christianity and Judaism have both collected the wisdom of past experience and recorded it for future use. Yes, there are superficial differences in time and place between then and now, but the problems people confronted then are ones we encounter today, just in different clothes. The book of Proverbs alone encapsulates many approaches to dealing with today's challenges in simple to understand and apply form. Check out Proverbs 24:16 as but one example.
Today we have an entire society that has been deprived of boundaries, needlessly suffering in chaos and confusion without the tools needed to evaluate choices. Like rebellious teenagers, those who resent boundaries have worked to convince many others that their unhappiness is a result of arbitrary limits and that by removing those bounds they can achieve happiness.
Heroes in our own story
People can always find reasons for unhappiness. Yet in the final assessment, we alone are responsible for our feelings. Yes, we will encounter adverse circumstances. Loved ones die, businesses fail, accidents happen, houses burn down, and all sorts of things happen that provide ample occasion to feel sad or angry or hopeless. Still, though, it is our choice to see ourselves as victims or as the heroes of our own stories. Every hero myth has the protagonist confronting impossible odds, overcoming great trials and triumphing in the end. Often times, the greatest obstacle is within, be that fear, or doubt, or feeling inadequate, or hopelessness, it is that test that is the key to outward success.
We are advised to do the work we love, but far more powerful is to learn to love the work we do. We seek a mate who will make us happy forever rather than learning how to be a happy mate to the one we love. If only we had more money, or a nicer house, or better health, or any of a number of things we see as barriers to our happiness, then we could really enjoy life. How, though, could we expect to enjoy life with those things if we have never learned to enjoy the life we have?
If we give the power to determine our feelings over to others or to circumstances, we lose control over our lives. We live at the mercy of others, or worse, live trying to control the actions of others by demanding they always act so as to protect our feelings. We need "safe spaces" externally when true safety lies within. We may not be able to control what happens to us, but it is always our choice how we respond, including how we feel and interpret our feelings.
People are unhappy because they don't know how to be happy. They have been taught all their life that other people are responsible for their feelings, so they don't know how to reach inside themselves to find their own happiness and even joy. Fortunately, it is never too late to learn
There are lots of people with ideas and appealing "solutions" they wish to sell to us, but how many really work, really lead to meaningful, joyful lives? How do we evaluate which, if any, are right for us, and which are false roads? How to evaluate choices is one of the more important things to learn. One of my own favorites is if someone is pushing me hard to follow their path, it probably isn't for me. The harder they push the more I don't like it. Others will have their own favorites.
A child is unhappy and someone convinces them that if they can just get a few bits cut off, they will feel better, never realizing that their feelings are a part of growing up and that they will miss those bits later. Some see people with wealth while there are others who are poor, and become susceptible to Marxist ideas where if everyone just shared equally, everyone would be happy and there would be justice and plenty for all. Others are told that they are oppressed and held down because of some immutable characteristic, and that they can only be happy if they destroy their imagined oppressors. All these and more show failure of the boundary around blame of others.
With good boundaries in place the dark brooding forest becomes an airy glade with clearly marked paths to a good life of joy and fulfillment, of meaning and purpose, discovery and satisfaction.
"Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them." ~ George Santayana
That includes us and our own personal histories.
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David Robb is a practicing scientist and CTO of a small firm developing new security technologies for detection of drugs and other contraband. Dave has published extensively in TheBlueStateConservative, and occasionally in American Thinker.