Pxel

Friday, July 25, 2008

Fathers are a Crystal

Like a prism, through which lights reflects and changes direction, we are the medium that channels to our children the ideas, values, "memes" and dreams inherited from our fathers .
Between the three possible positions in the chain of inheritance, the father's is the most difficult. We are in the middle. Of course the easiest role is reserved for the child. He or she only has to receive, to process, to catalog and keep for present or future use. To make the choice of what to use and what to discard and replace.
The grandfather has it easy too: he transmits; almost always, without much selection done. Years of success or failure, all of it experience, are to be sent to this future embodied by his offspring. No doubts here, just the hope of having enough time to deliver.
But us fathers.. we have a difficult task. Responsible for this passage, we have to be faithful to this information, if we value it, or correct it when we feel it was wrong. But being it adhesion or reject, the values of the grandfather pass through the crystal of the father and end up in the mind of the child.
Distorted, respected, linear or wavy, the passage of these lines of information take our energy and make us responsible for the permanence of the line.
As we move between our father and child, trying to find a place comfortable to us, we seldom stand in the perfect spot. Sometimes we approach one or the other more, and the light beam through our head concentrates the direction of the closest relative and diffuses in the other. 
And sometimes we try to take distance from both, and stay at an angle. Then the prism of our minds force the information in strange and unexpected directions. But in the end, even if we try to avoid it the data ends up where it should go: in Junior's head. Almost always not in the way intended from Dad, but the kid sees it all, even what we tried so hard to hide. 
These transformations are what makes us different in every generation. Sometimes improving the original model, sometimes degrading it.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

A sense of Importance

Try to imagine a wild and screaming infinite space, full of danger. Big balls of fire cross its emptiness at high speed, expanding wildly  from an initial explosion where all was created. Round balls of rock orbit these balls of fire that, BTW, are on the process of burning themselves off and become Novas. 
The rocks cannot escape orbiting at incredible speed round the balls of fire, so they have to escort them towards an unknown place. And there are billions of balls of fire, trillions of rocks, and much more unknown stuff.
Around some of this traveling rocks exists a very thin layer of air and water. Its thickness: 1/20.000 of the diameter of the rock, thinner than the wrap of an apple. Real thin.
And in this layer survive some creatures. Not for long, because their lives last some decades, and they have been around for some 10.000 years while the dealings of this big, big space are counted in thousands of millions of years.
Also, they are feeble: in space, temperatures go in ranges of thousands of degrees, but switch the dial below or over a range of 50 degrees, and this creatures die very fast!  And any change in this very very thin layer of air and water kills them also!!
Yet the creatures are brave (and blind too), because even when their existence, as we see, is hanging from a thread, and could be wiped out without a blip in the general machinery of things, these funny creatures think of themselves as the center of the universe.

Beginning

This is my first post in a Blog.
Hopefully I will use it to jot down my thoughts, ideas, plans or anything that crosses my mind.
Years ago I would have done it in a legal yellow pad, in longhand with an HB Pencil and a lot of care.
No more. good.