James C. Struck: Author of The Curious Snowflake

Love

Few human ideas and experiences change as much through the course of our lives as our ideas about love.  When we are little, love is simple.  There’s our parents, whom we love with a kind of awestruck reverence, our siblings, whom we love with an odd mix of annoyance and camaraderie, and perhaps a favorite teddy bear or other item, which we love with the fierce possessiveness that only young children can muster.  As we reach school age, our ideas and experiences change.  We gain our first friendships, experience our first losses, and begin to learn that love is not a constant, but something that grows, morphs, shrinks, and even disappears over time.

And then puberty hits.

Hoo boy, this changes everything.  Now we have this new layer of love, one that our society glamorizes and denigrates at the same time.  Add in the massive cocktail of hormones and instincts that are part and parcel with growing up and there should be no surprise that our teen years are one big rollercoaster of emotions.  No one can love like a teenager, as evidenced by the plethora of dramatic and heartbreaking love stories starring young characters, from Romeo and Juliet to The Fault of Our Stars. And we’ve all been through this, haven’t we?  We all had that relationship in high school that we thought was THE ONE, but only lasted 3 months and ended with the bitterest of emotions.  It is, as they say, part of growing up.

But love continues to change.  If you are lucky enough to find someone to stay with for the long haul, you discover that love is not a constant.  People change.  You change.  So therefore, love must change as well.  Sometimes, sadly, this change creates incompatibilities, but for others it can deepen the love.  You begin to discover that, despite what our society teaches us, the overwhelming drunken feeling we had when we were teenagers was not love, but lust and instinct and novelty rolled into one.  Real love is different: less debilitating but stronger, less possessive but more connective, less physical but more intimate.  It becomes far less about having this other person and more about simply joy in that person’s existence.

But none of this will prepare you for having children.

The love you have for your kids, in some ways, is rather like the love you have for that first girl or boy when you are 15, but the instinctualness never goes away.  No matter how old your child is, the deep-seated urge to protect at all costs never fades.  From the first moment you realize that you will be a parent, the protectiveness is all-consuming, and it never fades.  But the love does change.  As your kids grow, they become their own people, with likes and dislikes and quirks and traits that are somehow both an amalgam of yours and your spouses, yet somehow completely unique.  They become people, and you come to love them as people, not just in the instinctual way you do in the beginning. Much as you “fall in love” during a new relationship and then it morphs into actual love as the relationship evolves, so do you “fall in love” with your infant child and then come to love them as an individual as they grow up themselves.

I am 40 years old.  My wife and I just celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary.  Our three children are 16, 9 1/2. and 8.  I realize that I am still learning about love.  I know nothing about getting to know the people my children will date and eventually marry (my oldest just got his first girlfriend and we haven’t officially met her yet).  I know nothing about the love I will experience as a grandfather.  Most importantly, I fully expect that the love I have for my wife will continue to evolve.  There is much I have still to learn.  But I know this, and that is wisdom.

Last week I went to Las Vegas for the annual GME Conference, and on the flight back I was able to get a window seat.  I’ve always loved being able to look out and watch the world from so high up, and I was inspired to write one of my now-rare poems.  I hope you enjoy it.

Seven Miles Up

Everyone should take an airplane trip once in a while

to gain a little humility,

to see our great constructs as patterned specks

our vast farmlands as a patterned quilt

the mountains themselves as crumpled paper

squeezed by some great Hand and then dropped.

Even the great rivers are reduced

to ribbons of silver bordered by fronds of green

like filing gathered around a sinuous magnet.

And then to look

up

up

up to a sky so utterly blue

it seems a breath could blow it away

and reveal the black and star-strewn Kosmos

hidden behind the azure film.

From seven miles up

the world seems both vaster and more small.

Hidden patterns of nature and of our own

are laid plain.

Life, us, all things strive for patterns

sense from senselessness

and in that we find beauty.

The meanders of a river

the whorls on my fingertip

the billion year dance of stars.

Patterns will out,

and in this I sense the Oneness of all things.

The whole debate between free will and destiny is something I’ve spent a great deal of time mulling over, and I’ve found that one’s beliefs on the subject hinge on two interrelated concepts: the nature of the Divine (what I call Oneness) and the purpose of physical reality. If a person believes that destiny exists, they also tend to believe in a strongly personal Creator who has a definite plan for us and all existence. If a person believes in free will, they tend to conceptualize the Divine in far less personal terms (if at all) and see life-purpose as far more free-form.  Yet I personally break from this mold. I believe that Oneness can be very personal, yet I believe strongly in free will. So allow me to lay out my reasoning and show how I came to this conclusion.

If there is such a thing as destiny, it must be put in place by God, or the Divine, or the Higher Powers, or whatever limited little name you wish to give the Unlimited. If this is the case, then the Divine must have requirements, desires, or preferences of some sort, otherwise there would be no destiny. So my question then is this; what sort of preferences would the Divine have? One does not have preferences simply to have them. They must fill some need, whether it be psychological, emotional, or what have you. Yet we are talking about Oneness, That Which Is, the source of everything in existence, the Alpha and Omega. How could such a Being need anything?

A second and related issue I have with destiny has to do with Time. For something to need anything, there has to be Time involved, because there must be a moment when the thing desired is not possessed, another when it is either achieved or thwarted, and a process or transition from one to the other. Thus for the Divine to have any desires or needs, the Divine must be bound up by Time. Yet science has proven that Time is actually an aspect of physical reality, that there is not Time and Space, but what they refer to as the Time/Space continuum. For Oneness to be bound in time would then be a limitation upon the Unlimited, an obvious contradiction.

Thus in order for Destiny to exist, it must be possible for the Divine to have requirements and be limited by Time, yet there cannot be anything the Unlimited does not have, and the Creator must exist independent of Time, thus I cannot see how Destiny can exist.

Yet there must be a purpose to physical reality, otherwise it would not exist either. So where does that leave us? This quandary bound me up for a very long time, until a friend sent me a link to a very nifty video called “How To Imagine 10 Dimensions”. It is about 11 minutes long, but completely worth the watch.

The important point is this: when a conscious being makes a choice, a “fracture” occurs in 6th dimensional “space”, a splitting off like the branches of a tree, one path representing one choice, the other the opposite. What this means is that every choice, every possibility, exists multidimensionally. This was the final piece for me, because this meant that no requirements could possibly exist, since all possibilities already do! I cannot have a specific destiny when an infinitude of Jim Strucks exist in an infinitude of possible worlds doing an infinitude of different things, and the same holds true for everyone else.

This also solved my conundrum concerning the purpose of Reality. Put simply, the purpose is Experience. There is only one thing which a singular consciousness cannot do, no matter how transcendent, and that is to understand itself if there is no basis for comparison. For “I” to exist, there must be “not I”, for “here” there must be “there”, and so on. Thus Oneness created All That Is within/from Itself in order for there to be a way for it to experience Itself as Itself, and also as not-Itself.

We, as conscious beings, have a most important job. Since we perceive reality in a linear fashion, we can make choices and create those multi-dimensional fractures of probability I mentioned before. Basically, each time a conscious being makes a choice, it doubles the possible ways the One Soul can experience Itself by splitting Reality into two.

Thus, our entire purpose is to make choices, and which choice we make is completely irrelevant as far as the One Soul is concerned, since from Its point of view, all choices and results exist. But this does not mean that it is all meaningless, not at all! Our choices make all the difference in the world to us. It is through our choices that we forge our experience, our particular perspective. The more consistent we are with our choices, the stronger our particular experience becomes, the more we are able to tap into the creative power within us. Therefore, the closest thing we have to an official purpose in life is to decide and proclaim Who We Are. Thus, in many ways, we are on the same voyage of self-understanding and self-creation which Oneness, only in microcosm.

I’ve been chewing on the idea of happiness for a long while now, and I’ve noticed something; it seems like it’s far easier to get a grasp on what happiness is not than what it is. We are told that happiness is Stuff or Self-Sacrifice or Falling In Love, that happiness is basically anything our society can turn into a product or an escape, yet all of those ideals are demonstrably lacking. I think that half the reason that people get involved in alternative religions is due to a dissatisfaction with society’s ideas about happiness.