Calblog

How different is each one of us? Really?

One thing that I find myself thinking more and more often is not how different each person is from another, but instead, how alike people tend to be. I first came across this when I had the opportunity to read some classic literature.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Anna Karenin, Tolstoy writes "Oblonsky smiled. He knew that feeling of Levin's so well - that for Levin all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except Kitty, and they had all the human weaknesses and were very ordinary girls; while Kitty was in a class by herself, without the least imperfection and above the rest of humanity." When I first came across this line I was 20 in College, I knew that feeling so well and could easily associate with it.

These kind of observations continued as I age. In reading Crime and Punishment, I found myself understanding Roskolnikov as he argues for the idea that some people are so great, that they stand above the law, to him this was Napoleon's case, to me, I saw the same in Julius Caesar. That somehow, because they had succeeded, that they were somehow also validated as being greater than all others standing above humanity. And then coming to recognize, that no man ought to stand above another, that the right or noble man, cannot stand above his conscience, and most importantly no one stands above God.

And this observation seems not to cease. Especially listening to Country Music. In Garth Brook's song Unanswered Prayers, he sings of an old high school flame "She was the one that I'd wanted for all times and each night I'd spend prayin' that God would make her mine and if he'd only grant me this wish I wished back then I'd never ask for anything again...And as she walked away and I looked at my wife and then and there I thanked the good Lord for the gifts in my life." Which again was something with which I completely relate.

Then Tim McGraw singing Where the Green Grass Grows "But all this glitter is gettin' dark there's concrete growin' in the city park I don't know who my neighbors are and there's bars on the corners and bars on my heart. I'm gonna live where the green grass grows watchin' my corn pop up in rows every night be tucked in close to you raise our kids where the good Lord's blessed point our rocking chairs towards the west plant our dreams where the peaceful river flows where the green grass grows." Having lived in Sacramento, then San Francisco, and now an ex-urb I feel the exact same way, Yes the commute is long, but it's definately worth the drive once I get home. Additionally, I care about my work, and am proud of it when I am finished, but I'm more amazed and taken when the tomatoes that my wife and I planted ripen, or the corn pops up in rows. Something, that to a great degree, I had a very small hand in.


My point in this I guess, is that the human condition at least to me seems surprisingly universal, and that we really don't start out that different from each other, but it is the choices we make that takes us down very different paths.