I went through a significant portion of my life without a lot of contact with my brother and sister. Life happened; we were in different states and all three of us were busy with life.
But in the last ten years we finally got together and spent time talking about growing up together. I can remember one Sunday afternoon we went out and had lunch and ended up in the restaurant for most of the afternoon.
My brother and I really opened up about the challenges of growing up in a 'war zone'. The standards for the male children in our family were off the charts. God forbid that we make a mistake! My brother and I had never talked about this before and it was a cathartic clearing of our communications.
Then my sister looked at the two of us and said, "Boy, did I grow up in a different household!" She was the princess who had the same stubborn and strong drive of my father. There were times in her arguments with dad (my brother and I had moved out so she was the only child at home) that he got so frustrated his neck vocal cords would turn red and throb and he would just walk out of the room.
This was part of the perception that happens to all of us. We experience life from our filters, from our culture, and it may seem totally different for each of us.
There were a couple of years we lived in Mississippi, deep in the south at Biloxi. I was 8 years old and my brother was 7. When we first arrived in the area it was May and school was out for a couple months. My father refused to live on base so he was looking for a rental house.
Meanwhile we were living in a fairly cheap motel on the Coast Highway. Behind the motel was a swamp consisting of probably 10 acres of swamp wilderness. Each weekend that summer we would disappear during the day and only come home at dark. We explored quicksand, chopped down trees, found abandoned cabins, and interacted with the wild toads and other small animals while staying away from the big ones.
It was a little boy's heaven though my adult friends hearing the story now speak of the abuse around parental neglect. We didn't see it that way; we saw it as freedom to do what we wanted when we wanted. We were blessed that both my brother and I had internal moral values that kept us naive and innocent.
Then September came along and the culture shock of perception hit. We were not in a California school with a pass fail system. There was strong discipline and consequences to actions.
I got my lesson in my second or third week in my class. I was in a forth grade class and though the lessons seemed easier everything else was a shock to my system.
It was during a class lesson when one of the other boys in the classroom talked back to the teacher about something. The room got very quiet, then the woman teacher walked over to the boy and backhanded him right off his chair onto the floor!
I was in shock and filled with righteousness. This was not right. I leaned over to the boy sitting next to me and whispered to him, "She can't do that! It's not legal!" He turned and looked at me and he grinned. "You tell her," he said. At that moment, I decided I was in a foreign country and I needed to follow their rules. It was the start of the blessing of life that we always need to see the other side to understand all about perception.. What does that person think to do the things they did? It is the only way to explain some of the more bizarre news items we read about in the world.
Thus in today's world much of what we do is around gathering information before we take the next step. Keep moving and in the end you won't have the sinking feeling that I had when my classmate told me to tell her myself!
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