Realization is dawning. Instead of playing the tyrant, therefore, you are paying attention. You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world. You are negotiating, instead of playing the martyr or the tyrant. You no longer have to be envious, because you no longer know that someone else truly has it better. You no longer have to be frustrated, because you have learned to aim low, and to be patient. You are discovering who you are, and what you want, and what you are willing to do. You are finding that the solutions to your particular problems have to be tailored to you, personally and precisely. You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself.
Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.
Now, your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. Even a man on a sinking ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a lifeboat! And who knows where he might go, in the future. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully….
Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. If you ask, as if you want, and knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered the chance to improve your life, a little; a lot; completely—and with that improvement, some progress will be made in Being itself.
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
RULE 5
DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM
ACTUALLY, IT'S NOT OK
RECENTLY, I WATCHED A THREE-YEAR-OLD boy trail his mother and father slowly through a crowded airport. He was screaming violently at five-second intervals—and, more important, he was doing it voluntarily. He wasn’t at the end of his tether. As a parent, I could tell from the tone. He was irritating his parents and hundreds of other people to gain attention. Maybe he needed something. But that was no way to get it, and his parents should have let him know that. You might object that “perhaps they were worn out, and jet-lagged, after a long trip.” But thirty seconds of carefully directed problem-solving would have brought the shameful episode to a halt. More thoughtful parents would not have let someone they truly cared for become the object of a crowd’s contempt.
I have also watched a couple, unable or unwilling to say no to their two-year-old, obliged to follow closely behind him everywhere he went, every moment of what was supposed to be an enjoyable social visit, because he misbehaved so badly when not micro-managed that he could not be given a second of genuine freedom without risk. The desire of his parents to let their child act without correction on every impulse perversely produced precisely the opposite effect: they deprived him instead of every opportunity to engage in independent action. Because they did not dare to teach him what “No” means, he had no conception of the reasonable limits enabling maximal toddler autonomy. It was a classic example of too much chaos breeding too much order (and the inevitable reversal). I have, similarly, seen parents rendered unable to engage in adult conversation at a dinner party because their children, four and five, dominated the social scene, eating the centres out of all the sliced bread, subjecting everyone to their juvenile tyranny, while mom and dad watched, embarrassed and bereft of the ability to intervene.
When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other boys, other men—not for their dear sons.
Something of the same sort may underlie, in part, the preference for male children seen most particularly in places such as India, Pakistan and China, where sex-selective abortion is widely practised. The Wikipedia entry for that practice attributes its existence to “cultural norms” favouring male over female children. (I cite Wikipedia because it is collectively written and edited and, therefore, the perfect place to find accepted wisdom.) But there’s no evidence that such ideas are strictly cultural. There are plausible psycho-biological reasons for the evolution of such an attitude, and they’re not pretty, from a modern, egalitarian perspective. If circumstances force you to put all your eggs into one basket, so to speak, a son is a better bet, by the strict standards of evolutionary logic, where the proliferation of your genes is all that matters. Why?
Well, a reproductively successful daughter might gain you eight or nine children. The Holocaust survivor Yitta Schwartz, a star in this regard, had three generations of direct descendants who matched such performance. She was the ancestor of almost two thousand people by the time of her death in 2010.77 But the sky is truly the limit with a reproductively successful son. Sex with multiple female partners is his ticket to exponential reproduction (given our species’ practical limitation to single births). Rumour has it that the actor Warren Beatty and the athlete Wilt Chamberlain each bedded multiple thousands of women (something not unknown, as well, among rock stars). They didn’t produce children in those numbers. Modern birth control limits that. But similar celebrity types in the past have done so. The forefather of the Qing dynasty, Giocangga (circa 1550), for example, is the male-line ancestor of a million and a half people in northeastern China.78 The medieval Uí Néill dynasty produced up to three million male descendants, localized mainly in northwestern Ireland and the US, through Irish emigration.79 And the king of them all, Genghis Khan, conqueror of much of Asia, is forefather of 8 percent of the men in Central Asia—sixteen million male descendants, 34 generations later.80 So, from a deep, biological perspective there are reasons why parents might favour sons sufficiently to eliminate female fetuses, although I am not claiming direct causality, nor suggesting a lack of other, more culturally-dependent reasons.