Pomposity

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There is something in me that loves to hold a new human; meeting that brand new person and holding a tiny bundle of potential gives me great hope.

In those early days there is such helplessness; leave that child alone and it will certainly die, but place it within a family and watch what happens. I have experienced this miracle twice, both were very similar and as they have grown the similarities have increased to the extent that facial recognition software struggles to differentiate between them.

From day one, however,  they were completely different in their characters; aside from the obvious gender difference they did not respond to things in the same way. Our son is Mr routine and slept like a little soldier all tightly swaddled and secure; our daughter accepted routine with some reluctance and hated being confined in any way (she still does).

Looking at these little bundles of helplessness it would be easy to forget what is inherently secreted into their Dna; we are all born with the notion that we are the centre of the universe, we couldn’t articulate that for most of our early life but it is implanted in us. It is an important survival instinct that takes new parents by storm; we bring home a sleeping settled baby and think that “we got a good one here,” then day three strikes like hurricane Joaquin and this thing turns into Chucky.

Our daughter would begin to cry in a fairly gentle girly way and progress in decibelic increments, there would be an intake of breath and then something akin to an air raid siren would exude from her sweet countenance.  It usually boils down to 4 basic elements: hunger, pain, tiredness, or poop. Eliminating these generally stopped the ear drum assault.

This self-importance is what is required to shake new parents into action to care for a new person; we don’t get to goo-goo all day, we are now responsible for the development of another human and they are going to make sure we know it.

I am by no means an expert on child psychology but I have seen how a child can demand and control a house full of adults for years after the initial need is over. Our next responsibility as parents is to prepare this child to be able to be part of a social and societal structure.

That survival instinct which is so essential in a baby is not quite so attractive in an adult.

The generation of ‘me’ has spawned a mindset that assumes that I am still the centre of the universe and everything revolves around me and my happiness. The biggest problem with this is that it is complete nonsense; nothing can function at a family, business or national level if everyone is the most important. We simply cannot go around with the words of Goofy in our heads:

“O the world owes me a livin”

We need to replace them with Mark Twain:

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

The opposite extreme is equally imbalanced where we go around eating worms and having no self worth; “we are fearfully and wonderfully made” and have no business decrying such a unique individual as you are, both mindsets are growing from the same pompous root and require serious attention.

We must be part of something bigger than ourselves.

I fear for our increasingly self-indulgent culture, no civilisation in history has survived it; we are building for ourselves a house of cards of Babalic proportions. We need an overhaul in our thinking before we become a generation of adult babies.

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