VICTIMS OF OUR TEACHERS

Hey out there! Things are not going to be like they have been for the last many decades. Patterns are going to change and thus the results will also. What once worked may not work any longer. I remember those words "men will not know what to do." And then some words from five or six weeks ago, "get ready for the next step." I can safely say that something is going on and getting ready to happen to our limited chain of experience. Don't forget that however hard you have a grasp of something is how tight a grasp it has on you.

We are victims of our teachers. Life and people have conspired to fashion us a certain way. And there is no guarantee that any of our basic beliefs are forever.

We humans are very conservative about some things. Hell. We are conservative about a lot of things! What worked for Uncle Joe or Grandpa Bill are surely going to work for us! We each have the human nature and what our human nature likes we wish to bestow upon ourselves. I think you can call that self interest.

But the habits of a young man become the ruts of an old man. As young men we made up our minds as to what we liked and stuck with achieving it. We had seen the way and it was doable. Had to be. Uncle Joe and Grandpa Bill had already demonstrated the possiblity. It had happened and thus it could happen again. Scientific reasoning applied to life.

How we looked at life and how we felt about life shaped our thinking about our future. The sawmill I ran over 30 years ago was going to run forever. But it sits there, a huge production machine, idle. Oh, it can still produce. No question about that. It's still a board cutting marvel. But the market has changed. Costs have gone through the roof. Twenty years ago it cost a hundred dollars of diesel fuel to run a skidder all day in the woods. Care to estimate what it costs now?

Our patterns of behavior are going to change or we will become the old has-beens. And I say the changes are coming quickly and decisivley. The true measure of our abilities and thinking will appear to everyone noticing. Who has the flexibilty to change with the rest of the world? Who can grasp the important issues and ignore the superfluous? Heady questions with deep meaning to our continued existance. Do we go the way of the dinosaur or do we mutate and live on? I would say that some of us will mutate. We will pick up on what is real and what is not real. Whaat is real will live. What is false and illusionary will die, and fade away.

Good fortune and Stay Alive!

Michael

mboone@rtccom.net