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The Mystery
The culture pushes young people too hard to define who they are before they have lived enough to know. How can they know such things? It makes sense that we want them to have a focus so they can meet their own needs, but how to clarify true-path, how to individuate from cultural and parental messaging, how to excavate their callings, before they have gone out into the world and gathered information from their experiences. No wonder there are so many identity crises in middle age- we defined ourselves from the outside in when we were young! It may seem counter-intuitive in a pragmatic, survivalist culture, but the young need to be encouraged to embrace and explore their confusion wholeheartedly. In the heart of the not knowing are the paths they are here to walk.
— Jeff Brown
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When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive mind had dwelt, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether:
“Where did you go, my darling?”
….
I wish I could have given my grandmother, and given the dying Whitman, the infinitely invigorating Mr g: A Novel About the Creation (public library) by the poetic physicist Alan Lightman — a…
