Lessons and Growth

The lessons that life has to teach us through experience just about always seem to come too slow or too hard. The lessons we teach each other seem to do the same. If we are lucky we find ourselves at the start of our life within a loving family network that supports us and cares for us while we are incapable of doing it ourselves, if we are unlucky and do not have that luxury we rarely survive. Then after five years of being loved, finding our feet and learning what we can of this world we find ourselves in, we are tossed into school, where we learn the social skills that will continue to shape throughout our lives, we learn that bullies win, that people who claim to have authority can get people into trouble for what they do but can not stop it from happening to begin with, and we are forced to learn, in groups of twenty to thirty, learning has the fun taken out of it, and growing up seems even more urgent although it also seems less desirable somehow. From here we progress through many different life fazes with more differences between people’s life experience as we grow and shape our own, but those intense days of change shape the way we think of change for years to come, until those of us lucky to find our place in life and this world where we can continue to grow at our own pace in our own way in peace.

Normal

We draw what we call normal form what we class as different, weird or unusual, without this comparison there would be no cause for a normal, but what is it that makes us feel something is weird. Is it that we personally could not imagine doing such a thing or acting or thinking in such a way? Or is it that we could not even imagine the people around us acting in such a way? After all some what is normal food in some cultures would be considered very weird to other cultures, for example cannibalism would seem very unusual to most suburban peoples, but fast food would seem bizarre to a cannibal. This is a version of normal we gain through our surroundings and normally through childhood bassed upon what is common. There are other sorts of normal or not. Sometimes we find thing that define the majority of the people around us and still define them as not normal, such as having a mental illness, dysfunctional family, learning difficulties or sexual and or emotional intimate relationship problems, these things are usually classed as not being normal under the guise that they are not as common as they actually are because people do not like to own up to them and talk about them. People do not like to talk about them because they are seen as being weird or not normal.

Justice

There are many different ways to react when we feel we have been wronged, some of us accept it as a kind of karma for something we have done, (especially if we feel bad for something we have done recently) sometimes we just feel sad and cold, particularly if it was something emotional between friends, family or lovers, sometimes we feel angry, this anger can be directed at the world or god, particularly in wrongs that we could not have helped, such as when a young mother or a child is diagnosed with cancer, but sometimes we feel angry at the news bringer, such as the doctors, sometimes we feel angry at the person who has caused the wrong, such as the person who has destroyed our property. This is when justice is called for, but as this justice is born of anger we have to ask is this about revenge, about making us feel better that we are not the only ones hurt, about hurting those who have hurt us. Should justice be what we use to make the victim feel better? Should we keep them safe in their own minds or should we do our best to ensure that the injustice or wrong is righted as much as possible and does not occur again.