This may be simply another aspect of the angst I'm going through these days, wondering, once again, if anything I write is worth a damn. Wondering if the pictures I shoot are worth the paper to print them on. Wondering if anything I say in the pursuit of trying to make a difference is worth uttering.

Wondering.

I'm wondering too if anything I say to anyone in the attempt to pass on "wisdom" is really going anywhere. In particular I wonder about our 21 year old. Sometimes I think that just when I've got something I can pass on to her that will really help her move on in her life and avoid unnecessary pitfalls, to use a football analogy, it turns out to be an incomplete pass. "Ineligible receiver downfield!" would be the call.

Fourth down and time to punt.

It does seem pointless to try to help others miss the potholes sometimes. It's as if every person has to go through a requisite number of self-selected hells in order to really get it. You can't hire a proxy to do it for you and there's no sure way to look ahead for a possible alternate route. Go to all the card readers, astrologists and fortunetellers you can find and no amount of "magical revelation" will change the choices. Nope, you can't get from here to there without passing though the SWAMP of.....whatever it is that comes next, ranging from a tattoo to a terrible relationship, a bad marriage, a couple of kids, a divorce, an addiction to one thing or another, a car crash or two, the loss of one or more good jobs, betrayals (of you and by you) and sundry turns and twists of Fate.

No way to protect yourself or, most frustrating of all, your kids, from going through all of it. As a greeting card I got for Elizabeth says; "They say you learn most from your most difficult experiences.....what a stupid system!"

My experience both as a regular run-of-the-mill therapist and a Tarot Card reader has shown me over and over and over again that no matter what I can see about the road a person is traveling, and no matter how clever I can be about trying to urge them to attempt a different path, they will go where they must go....I guess so that they can experience just exactly what it is they must.

And I suppose, if there is anything to the idea of "destiny" each must proceed upon the road, the Quest, that will teach them the lessons that have to be accomplished. Is it Karma? Fate? Genetics? I don't know. What I do know is that you might as well try to stop a run-away train as turn anyone from a path they have determined to take in the name of that double edged sword called "free choice". The outcome can be clear as a non-polluted day for you and I, but the subject of our anxiety will not want to see it, or will deny that such a thing could possibly be visited upon them.

Like ageing I suppose.

With all of that lined up I guess I feel like Turgenev's "Superfluous Man" since I can't effect a change in anyone else's life, what's the point of mine?

This whole piece is a "process" of course and I will come out the end assuring myself that I have indeed made a difference in some lives at least with whatever I have undertaken, and I, like George Bailey, will in the end, have played a vital role in this little game though my own myopia keeps me from seeing it.

I know this much, after I've encountered someone and have thought, as they go on their way, that I may have helped them find a turning point, I can stay with that fantasy a lot longer than I can as I watch my kids, on a daily basis, fumble away the wonderful wisdom I just passed on yesterday, just as I thought we were on our way to a score.
 

Dick Prosapio ©2005, All Rights Reserved
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