Not Me
posted in Rantings |I spent part of this morning looking for an image of the Family Circus’s “not me” schmoo. Because he and his brethren (”I dunno” and “Not My Fault”) have moved in. I would love to evict them; which means I need to teach my kids to take responsibility for their actions and to help find solutions rather than placing blame.
Not that I don’t do that now, but somewhere I’ve gone wrong with it.
But in searching for that image, I stumbled upon the Nietzche Family Circus, a parody of that damnably tepid comic. This quote made me pause; “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” I can totally see where Nietzche is coming from with that, and in some of my more angsty days, I could actually think that.
Hope provides a barrier, a resistance to acceptance. If you hope for an outcome, you’re not accepting some other outcome. I wonder what our Bhuddist friends make of this. “Life is suffering” is not that too far removed from “hope is the worst of all evils” — or is it? Both seem to lead one to an acceptance of “the bad situations we find ourselves in,” from which we can work our way out of them.
