Three Lessons to Teach The World, Part I

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II

Back when we were undergoing the trials and tribulations of the adoption process, Eva and I had to answer an awful lot of questions in writing. It came out to something like seventy pages between the two of us. At any rate, both of us were asked to name three things we admired about each other. The three things Eva answered: he makes me laugh; his stability; his loving nature. It occurs to me that while the first and third of those attributes has been with me a long time, the second--the stability--has not. It's been hard-won.

My family moved around an awful lot while I was growing up. I went to four different elementary schools (with two stints at one of them) and three secondary schools. This was no choice of mine, believe me. The first move was forced...after that, whatever reasons my folks had for changing locales were not forthcoming to the likes of little old me.
Of course, I never thought to question the decision to move, any more than I thought to question anything else my parents decided to do. Unlike so many kids today, I didn't drive the family bus. I was strictly a backseat kid.
As the moves piled up, I piled up derogatory epithets. Every year brought a new school and a refinement in the lexicon: I was a 'spazz' in grade four, a 'quad' in grade five, a 'geek' in grade six. 'Nerd' (sometimes spelled 'nurd', the better to place next to 'turd') was the standby. I'd struggle along for a term or two, always on the outside, my only consolation being that whatever hell I was going through wouldn't last. It would only be a matter of time, and not very much time at that, before I would begin to hear the words 'fresh start' from my parents and shortly thereafter I'd be packing again.
Not that it mattered, of course: that hell would only be replaced with a different (though strangely very similar) hell. In one neighbourhood, I'd be kicked in the nuts; in another, somebody would creep up behind me and give my nuts a squeeze. The end result was the same: pain, nausea and a kind of numbness.
In grade seven, I found myself placed in a TAG program at yet another school. TAG stands for 'talented and gifted'. God, how quickly I grew to hate that word 'gifted'. The 'norms' who also attended St George's imbued 'gifted' with at least as much hatred as my earlier classmates had the words 'spazz', 'quad' and 'geek' and threw it at me every chance they got...which, thankfully, was not often. Within the TAG program, my name was usually Ken.
I was still somewhat of a class pariah, though, for two reasons: First, most of my fellow 'gifties' were considerably more socially adept than I. And second, the nature of our respective 'gifts' fundamentally differed. Pretty much everyone in Mr. White's class was exceptionally skilled in mathematics and hard science. I, by contrast, was an average science student and outright bad at math, but a much more wide-ranging reader and accomplished writer.
The TAG program was, in hindsight, the first of my scholastic mistakes. There was no discipline and no set curriculum, also no homework. We were largely left alone to our own devices. While this may sound like heaven to anyone slogging through several class projects, trust me, it's not. Not when you leave to go back to a regular grade nine program and find yourself barely above water thanks to two missed years of math class.

Arabic has two phrases: al-fa-il and al ma fa'ul: the doer and the done-to. I was most definitely the done-to in my childhood and adolescence. It took many moves before I began to even consider my own complicity in the way people treated me. Of course, having considered that, I found myself still at a disadvantage, having no idea how else to act. It was still many years before I managed to tone down the offending parts of my nature and achieve some sort of social standing.

I was in my twenties by the time I fully understood what a burden of pity I had placed on myself and what a self-fulfilling prophecy self-pity is. Eventually, epiphany: every state of mind is both a choice and a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be happy, I didn't need to wait around for some happy-making thing to happen. I could simply choose happiness, and happiness would follow.

Bullshit, I hear the voices saying. It can't be that easy.
It is.
Or rather, it is, once you've gotten past the difficult-to-accept idea that happiness is actually a choice: that in the world of emotion, you can be the doer and not the done-to. That's me in a nutshell, at least now: at cause for my own emotions, whatever happens.

This is an enormously liberating belief to have. It frees you from enslavement to all manner of negative thoughts and emotions. It makes life considerably more fun to live. And that's the first lesson I'd like to teach the world.