Part 17

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers

Oscar Wilde quote.  No current allusion to the above.   I just heard the quote the other day and liked it.    

I remember in high school praying to God that if he would only get Peggy back for me that I would never ask for anything from him ever again.   He never answered.  Or maybe, he answered in the best way he could.   There is a song by Garth Brooks about this called "Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers".   Here is a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXzdm1cz1XU

The same path that looks scary walking forward, makes more sense looking back on it.  The things you think you want today may hinder you tomorrow.   Walking through life is like walking through tall weeds.  You can't look ahead.  You can barely look behind you and understand what the hell just happened.  

When I ran technology projects, we would get to a version 7 or 8 and one of us would suddenly have an inspirational idea that might solve a problem that had been plaguing the technology since version 1.    We would implement it and the problem would be fixed, and the client would inevitably ask "Well, why didn't you think of that in the first place?", and the answer would always be "None of us thought of it at the time".   You hack through the tall weeds, and only later can you see the path behind you, and maybe have an idea on how to deal with the way forward. 

Its impossible to know what lays ahead of us, for even a day, because life proves again and again that it can turn you around on a dime.  This is the main lesson in life.  The moment NOW is all we have.  If we listen, we should learn that the sum total of all that we have to hold onto in life is only the moment we are currently experiencing, in addition to a loose assortment of memories that we imagine belong in our past.  We can plan for our future and hope for the best, but we certainly don't own our future.  Our ways are leaves upon the sea, and all too vulnerable to the swirling tides.

It's the hardest lesson to learn.

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There is corollary quote of ancient Greek origin:  

    Whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad

or - translated another way -  

    evil appears as good in the minds of those whom the gods lead to destruction

Rationalized delusion is in all of us, to varying degrees.  It is almost impossible for any of us to see the extant of our own delusions.  Case in point the current raging delta virus.    I have a couple of good friends in Bandon who are locals and are completely rational and good people in most respects, except for the vaccine that can save them should they get catch the virus.  They are caught up in their hatred of government and their politics.   You can argue for hours with them, and they do not believe in it.  Never mind that 1) all of science 2) all of academia 3) all experts say that the vaccine will save them, they are convinced that it is all a fraud.

This complete inability to get inside someone else's mind and figure out how they can think this way is a mystery. The vaccines have been available to all of us for FREE for nine months now, and 98 percent of all deaths now in hospitals are from unvaccinated individuals, all of whom bet that they would not get the coronavirus, and every one of them bet wrong, but if I try to talk to my obstinate friends about it, they are convinced they will not get it.

It's so hard to understand the twisted logic convolutions a mind has to go through to get to that point of obstinacy.  It's madness, but madness on a large social scale, which is why thousands of these people are dying EVERY SINGLE DAY in this country.    Hard to shake someone from what you are convinced are suicidal beliefs.

Religion has a similar hold on people.   You can point to the blue sky and say it is blue, and they will say Nope because they have been led to believe otherwise.    It says in their Holy Book otherwise.   Mass delusion.  Personal bias.   Seeing it in others, it should lead each of us to wonder about our own, and what that bias leads us to not see laying in front of our own noses.

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I have found similar confusions between people when it has to do with Being On Time.   Half the world adheres to it.   The other half cannot understand what they see as a crazed obsession.    Neither side convince the other of their base rationale.   

Maybe  - like with most other things - there might be an evolutionary explanation in all of this.   Evolution does not care about the individual at all, but only in the continuation of life, and so it is constantly experimenting with shaded differences with all life forms - the miracle of DNA.   Natural selection plays with species and individuals within a species all of the time.  

Each of us is a DNA experiment.    We are all made just a little bit differently form each other, so that when nature throws a wrench in the works through famine, disease, natural disasters,  etc, etc, as it always will, some individuals, and some species have a stronger chance of survival due to their differences from one another.

Maybe obstinacy is one of those things that can be an evolutionary advantage.   We all think differently, and  - for some of us - that difference might at some future moment be the deciding factor on whether we live to see the next day or not, while others around us fall.

Hard for any of us to see through the tall weeds and guess what any of that means, as none of knows what tomorrow will bring.

A last thought:

https://www.undergroundthomist.org/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-make-mad