Twinnies Visiting

M and two of our grandkids ... genetically identical girls are sleeping upstairs. GuntherDog and I came down to start another day. Got me thinking about kids .... and what I've referred to here as the "fractal" nature of the unfolding generations.

As it is not written: Kids? You can live with them and you can live without them. By the time M and I settled in Philadelphia in 1974, we must've lived in 9 places in same number of years, including three continents. We managed the production of two spawn and a third was to come 2 years later. I suspect my kids have roughly matched their parents sojourns with one of them always living within 750 miles and now sharing an office sometimes with me ... another flitting around with 2500 miles and now 330 miles away and another who has lived in Europe, Asia, South America and has been with 11 miles for past couple of years.

You now, I suppose, the various ideas about Brownian motions .... kinda like dropping a drunk in the middle of a field, some have said.  The probabilities are that they'll end up in proximity to the dropoff point but the probability is by no means zero that they'll wander off to great distances.

Long liked Gibran's dittie on kids, except that my sense is that the stability of parents of which he speaks is a relative measure and only that .... I could, I suspect, someday climb on one of my 1974 Raleighs, kickstart a Norton or turn the keys on my Boxster and be off following the Sun or my typewriter into a new adventure .... though it would be cruel for M and I to leave it to my kids to clean out closets that have been filling for 35 years in our old barn that we've called home and I'm not sure how happy M would be on the back of a Norton.

I suspect that Gibran was talking about different differences with kids ... and those become pronounced much more so than the geographic ones. Like with the twin girls upstairs, genetics is but part of an unfolding matrix of potentials that allow us to carry ourselves (free will, choice and all tha philosophical stuff) in a multiplicity of directions by the time we end up still figuring things out in the Fourth Quarter. If I had to write it for Gibran, it would start something like:

 'Your Selves are not Unitary Selves ....
but the unpredictable ends of Complexity
and of Chaos,
Mother to all the gods.
Fasten your seatbelts;
Enjoy the ride.'

On Children (Gibran ... last century sometime)
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.