God's Choice by Alan Peshkin

All my life, I knew that my family and friends were different. We wanted to be different! We were a chosen people, the People of GOD. We were supposed to have the mark of special separation on every visible manifestation of ourselves.

Of course, that special mark of differentness was supposed to be the same on each one of us different folks.

To maintain the separateness we attained from our religion, we had our own school, our own music, our own books, our own stories, heroes and villians.

As an adult, when I left (or was foisted out of) that uniformly different world, I soon realized that I had no hooks, no stickiness to connect with the rest of the world. That rest of the world that I was now entering. It was as if I hit a sci-fi style portal, shooting me into another dimension and closing forever behind me. Leaving the first one meant I could not return.

Who were these new citizens? THEY believed all kinds of different things. THEY made choices, had opinions, enjoyed themselves with a simplicity I could not fathom.

My upbringing had hammered home the point of PURPOSE, MEANING so much that I had serious trouble recognizing 'fun' when I ran across it. It was a prescriptive thing, something that other people had to give to me, rather than something I could grasp on my own.There was no room in my world for pure pleasure. Every action, thought, intention had to be weighed on the grounds of its consequences towards my eternal fate.

In this new world, I felt vastly alone. There seemed to be no one in the world who understood me or what I was saying. I began to educate myself on the lexicon of communication these former outsiders used. It turns out they mostly communicated in terms of entertainment culture: tv shows, movies, music, and to a teeny tiny extent, books.

I loved this new world, where ideas and questions were tolerated and embraced. But I was terrified as well. What were the consequences? I couldn't tell. The new citizens seemed comfortable with uncertainty. Before, uncertainty was almost unknown. To admit to extended uncertainty was to admit a personal failure.

Article Author: Murphy

Murphy Daley is a long-time BlogCritic. Murphy’s first book The Parable of Miriam the Camel Driver draws from her experience in corporate America to examine the bigger questions about balancing career and creativity. …

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