Foundations in Life: What Mattered Then, Matters Now

During the last few years, there was something I was confused about; recently, a friend helped to clear up the confusion simply by filling me in on the time-frame of this particular subject-- the self-centeredness which some people live by. I replied that while the area where I spent most of my growing-up years wasn't one to grab onto every new "fad" that came along anyway, the main reason I was not familiar with it until recent years was that we all had entirely different priorities, an entirely different focus.

The point: what mattered then, matters now. Why? Because it is the foundation one develops in one's younger years that largely determines the rest of one's life-- a person's priorities, outlook, lifestyle. Something in the news brought this into a clear focus. At the point in time when people such as my family and neighbors had concerns such as this http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080906/ap_on_re_us/pueblo_reunion;_ylt=AoOVsfDBIk8UjX5JNiuEjUtvzwcF others, such as those in this locale, were buying into the "new trend" of self-this and self-that-- "Life, and everything in it, is All About Me."

While I "put away the things of childhood" at a relatively young age, I find it very difficult to cope with those who have never done so at all. Forty years ago, when my concerns were for my brother who was serving in Vietnam at the time of the Pueblo disaster, what would become of the United States of America and its people after both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and other such mature concerns, my age-peer counterparts in this new locale had different priorities: How much they could "get away with," drugs, sex, alcohol, petty crime, "rebelling against Authority," etc.

Their "foundation" has proven to be as strong, influential, and indestructible as mine. Forty years later, they are still rebelling, still bent on what they can get away with-- perpetual adolescents who have never put away the things of their childhoods. There is no common ground.

It was not until recent years that I came to truly appreciate my foundation. When I see so many whose only sense of "community" is the "community of three: Me, Myself, and I," I even more appreciate the older members of my family who opened up the world to me-- while "I" matter, life is not "all about Me." As such, even if in just small ways, I try to do more than simply take up space on the planet. I am a participant in this world.