My kids give me joy beyond anything else.
In certain ways at least. They provide me a future. A solace in the unknown, that even though things may happen outside my control and even though I don’t know what the future holds I know that my children will be there. Their smiles. Their will. Their ability to just be themselves. I want that for them. I want that for me.
My children are a beacon of something greater than hope. Perhaps there isn’t anything greater than hope. Some say so. But to me the hope of my children is mingled with pride, and purpose, and look! There’s oozing goodness flowing out the side of the gashes from all those imperfections they carry around with them. My kids are good. My future is good. My kids are my future. Everything I do I do for my kids.
Sometimes I worry that people do things for an aspect of consciousness that doesn’t run so deep, but only exists on the surface. A want or a wish that will suffice for today, and possibly this week or month, but not forever. Also, our society seems hell bent on making the reality of now last forever, at least the reality of our minds. Our minds are not growing when we are sedated in front of a screen, being fed an algorithm’s endless cycle of reactions and emotions we don’t need to work for. Some of this is good; it’s a reprieve from reality. We all need that. But when reality itself is subsumed by this shallow facsimile it means we are tied to the present inexorably. This makes the problem of surface level goals seem both better and worse.
It’s better because folks don’t notice the problem and it keeps the pain at bay. Why does anything under the surface, motivation or learning soft skills like determination, or the ability to be wrong gracefully, or to be a good person in the face of no discernable extrinsic reason, matter? It doesn’t matter if the world is a hamster wheel of surface level experiences. We become a mirror of the world our ancestors created with their cleverness and ability to create these experiences in the first place. But we’re being hijacked by those creations to become something we have never been.
It’s worse because being hidden as a problem doesn’t make it go away, and indeed makes it difficult to understand what the goal in the first place ought to be. Humans are multi-layered things. We have motivations that run deep as well as exist on the surface. Humans are a many layered mosaic of a thing; a hydra and a gazelle, a lion and a mouse. The destruction of this is a loss, and what we are losing only we can say. The world will not care.
My kids are a motivation so deep I can barely notice it except for the glimmering reflection it makes on the surface of the ocean my life raft sits upon. They are visible as shards of color shimmering over the water’s rippling surface, like warm light from a rosy sunset. But these subtle refractions of light are visible everywhere I look once I know to look for them. On every surface I see a subtle hint of light influenced from my children’s presence deep beneath the surface. Everywhere I look I see my kids. My kids are in everything when I look out at the vast sea. While I travel, while I do, while I work and grow and be a person they can be proud of. I see others living, and I find myself yearning for my kids to get on their life raft one day. I want them to live and love, laugh and play, to have something coming up to them from the deep. If perhaps I also am a sea of glimmering shards to them one day, then I will be doing my part to foster that motivation and meaning that travels up to them from the deep.
Perhaps living forever is possible. Perhaps the lives of those we’ve lost are still there, only they are beneath the surface. Perhaps what we are losing in our shallowness is something more.. the lives of those before us. Life isn’t just what we see on the surface, because what you see is also what is below whether or not we are aware of that. For me, my depth is my kids.
I love my kids. They are everything to me.
The Robot Proctor 