People can change.
Human nature is not immutable; your destiny is not set in stone. With concerted effort, or just the passing of time, you too can change.
What is true is that there are no sudden transformations.
Change is not a lightning bolt from the heavens, a thunderclap to jolt you out of your slumber, the hand of God reaching down to scare you straight. It’s more like water eroding the rock face of a waterfall over time – slowly, quietly, surely.
You don’t realize it’s happening until years later, when you wake up at five in the morning on a Sunday, lying in bed in your poorly heated flat, your girlfriend curled up against you for warmth, your eyes wide open staring at the ceiling asking yourself just how the fuck you got to this point.
And then you close your eyes, trying to shut out the din of cars racing down the trash-strewn streets.
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The very awesome thing about change is its insidiousness (or potential insidiousness). Daily living obliterates the big picture.
Change for most people happens slowly but there is the lightning bolt-hand of God thing occasionally. We call that the conversion experience. AKA finding Jesus. It kind of workd for non religious people too. Psychologists call it a significant emotional experience. Think big life events: death, birth, dismemberment, divorce, or nearly any of the above.
when it’s something beyond our control, it’s god. when it’s a situation we made for ourselves by daily decisions spread out over years, it’s circumstance/society/disadvantage/prejudice.
At least you’ve got the girlfriend. A dump with a good woman is better than a mansion with none or worse a bitch.
the situation you describe sounds more like a lamentable lack of change
So the white grape juice really did you in, huh?
Or perhaps, like a figure in an old Greek tragedy, your destiny is unavoidable after all; your character determined all of the little decisions that led you to where you are today.
Left-wingers like to indulge the idea that man can be remade, that he doesn’t have a fixed nature and therefore can choose to be whoever or whatever he likes. As I get closer and closer to my sixtieth year, I’m less and less inclined to think they are right.
As I understand it, the original Christian message was that we can break free from our destiny, free from the causal chains that have led us to where we now find ourselves. The Left has only secularized this idea, and made Man himself the agent of his salvation, rather than God.
When you put a man in jail, at first he’ll spend a lot of time pacing to and fro, looking for a way out. Perhaps he’ll plead with his jailers, insisting on his innocence and the injustice of his confinement. But there is no way out. The jailer never responds to his pleas — in fact, he rarely if ever shows himself. Eventually the prisoner becomes resigned to his fate. But he still sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling and wondering how it came to this…
tragedy also ignites change.
Default User: great effin song!
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