It Is All There

Everything you're looking for already exists. The work is finding it. We move through the world, we bump into things, and bit by bit we learn what we need to know. What we're after tends to sit closer than we assume.

Each of us arrives equipped. We come with the senses, the curiosity, the raw machinery to figure out our surroundings. And then what happens? Somebody says, "Curiosity killed the cat." The message starts young: accept things as they are. Many of us figure out early that asking too many questions makes the adults around us uneasy.

Don't question authority, we're told. Here are the rules, and they're usually the same rules your parents absorbed back when they were small. Ask why and you get the familiar wall: "Because I said so."

We're loaded with gifts that let us read the world and piece it together, and children pick this up fast. Before long a kid is navigating on their own. But does exploring the world for yourself produce one shared answer that everyone agrees on? Hardly.

Some experiences point us the wrong way. A child raised inside a pattern of abuse, emotional or physical, learns that the world can't be trusted. The picture they form of themselves comes out distorted. They can end up believing the treatment is what they're owed, that this is simply how things go for them.

Existence doesn't fold neatly into one tidy explanation. Whether a person can sit with life without a constant undercurrent of dread depends on things like their comfort with abstract ideas, their willingness to look at a situation from more than one angle, and how layered their sense of the world becomes.

That dread, though, can push a person forward. Feeling it, someone may find they can't go on living contentedly inside the version of reality they've been handed. So they reconsider. They rebuild their idea of what the world is, why it's here, and what any of it amounts to.

I'm not claiming everything your parents told you was a lie. Far from it. What I'm saying is that somewhere down the line you may work it out for yourself and decide that some of what they taught you, maybe most of it, was true after all.

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