I was raised in a suburban middle-class; white, god-fearing culture. A landscape of two story single-family homes and fathers who came home after dark. Our neighbourhood was safe from vandals and delinquent’s and alcoholic domestics. Instead it was awash with trimmed lawns, sculptured plants and the Rocky Mountains looming large to the East.
We were taught what was right and told what was wrong and expected to follow. Our happiness depended on navigating these rules. A childhood fraught with light-heartedness and paradoxically seriousness. Strangers were potential kidnappers and they lurked on every corner walking home from school—at least in my mind they were…
It was the days of Kodak and slide projectors: my father cherished both. Random nights turned into slide shows of faded memories of family trips and swimming holes. Bad haircuts and hand-me-down clothes and car laughing relics. Our whining turned to laughter after the second or third cassette was loaded into place. Clicking and whirring with the lights dimmed and another still frame of yesteryear.
A walk down a dusty strewn path of childhood memories good and bad: we all have them… Its why our Grandparents eat ice cream cones to feel like a child again, listening to music, comfort foods, the car you had as a teenager. The smells, the songs, the movies, the weather, the firsts: a kiss, swimming, falling, running, in love, freedom. Your first bike, first car, first broken heart and broken bone and those first stitches.
They are a part of us… they are a part of our lessons; our past and our future and the moment is richer because of them.
Ten years ago I read Walden by Henry David Thoreau: It is about living simple; surrounded by Nature. Henry was a student of Ralph Waldo Emerson and like Emerson a Transcendentalist. They believed in the sacredness of the individual mind, and not corrupting it from political, religious and educational ideologies.
“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
― Henry David Thoreau
My opinion of myself needed some work, the one that Thoreau taught me to focus on. Not anyone’s opinion of you mattered. When the light turns on you cannot turn it off. When we wake from a dream we cannot call it a dream any longer.
Life is much more than a philosophy and a memory; much more than a childhood picture; it is all of those things and more. Whether we choose a fulfilling life that not only enriches us but our loved ones or we choose a life of futility; it is ultimately our choice.
At the chiropractic space we value individual choice: whether we see you once or multiple times it will be your choice. Our childhoods make us unique and all the in-betweens from that place to this one find us exactly the way we are. And our choices…? Our never failing compass; as to what shores we land upon…
