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As we grow from infants to school age, the inputs into our minds continue, and they come from an increasing variety of sources. We may have playmates, who have caretakers. We may have relatives in our age group, and they too have caretakers. We begin to be mesmerized by television, either broadcast or videos of our favorite characters. We may even begin to enjoy music. And all of this input streams into our minds outside of our control.
And then we go off to school (or day care, or preschool), and begin the years of spending a lot of time with people who we are not related to, and really know very little about. We trust that our teachers have been schooled properly to hold a job with such great responsibility, but you never really know. And all of their teachings continue to barrage our brains with information, building upon the layers that went before them, and constructing the framework by which future input will be processed and stored.
Some of the things that get stored into our minds at this stage are relatively unimportant. The way we pronounce certain words, like “creek,” are defined by our families and the region of the country where we grow up. Whether we call it “soda” or “pop” or “a Coke” again is dependent on factors that have little to do with us. But there are many things that have been installed that will be important the rest of our lives. We learn how to react when people threaten us or speak ill to us. We learn about hugging and kissing. We learn the value of birthdays and other celebrations. We learn how to apologize. We learn what it means to apologize. We learn to forgive others who do wrong to us, or we learn to hold a grudge against them. We learn how to worship our respective superior beings. We basically learn how to treat other people. And we learn how to treat ourselves. We learn all of this by observing life around us, and we have no say in what we see and what we hear. We do not know when to leave the room, or we cannot leave the room. The building blocks to our comfort zone are laid by people other than us! And as a child, we are given no choice but to be there, and we do not know what to accept as good and what to reject as not so good. We are sponges!
And unfortunately for some of us, we learn some things that will not exactly help us as we grow older. We learn that families argue and use bad words. We learn that sometimes the arguments progress into people hitting loved ones. We see that apologies are not always forthcoming from people who feel they are right in doing these things. We see that celebrations are occasions to drink to excess, or the time to ingest recreational drugs. And because we see the people who have helped to program our minds doing these things, they become OK for us, maybe not at that moment, but when we reach the right age. And it all goes into our minds, building our comfort zone with no editing from us.
Fortunately for most of us, the good stuff that enters our minds far outnumbers the bad pieces of information our young brains process. But as we will begin to see next time, it only takes a few bad bits to spoil the whole deal.
Until Next Time,
Julius
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