First Part: My Early Experiences:
My early experiences involved my parents and me. My earliest memory was of me playing alone on the living room floor with blocks. My parents were in the kitchen or dining room. Later when I was 4 I told my mother I had 7 memories, or 8 if I included the memory of the what I was looking at right then, which was clothes on a line across the street. Later, from when I was 5 or 6, I remember having a nightmare or two, and I remember my father reading to me in the evening. I remember that my parents loved me, and that means at the least that they cared enough about me to take care of me and I felt that I could depend on them, and they liked me. How these things work: There are such things as memories, love, parents, and parents taking care of children. Where the necessities of life come from: parents give food and shelter to their children. (Where parents get food and shelter became evident much later.) These things are not true for everybody. But they are how I learned to view the world at an early age, without thinking much about the love at the time; it was just the environment I was in and I didn't know any other.
Second Part: The Wider World Of People:
For me, or for the vast majority of people, the world consists mainly of people. We care about what people do for us or to us, we care whether they like us and spend time with us, and we care how they perceive us. What a person cares about becomes the shape, or the main content, of his or her world, insofar as he or she perceives the world and interacts meaningfully with it. I've never gone hungry, and virtually never gone without shelter, but even if food and shelter were problematic, it's likely that other people would form a large part of how one obtains them.
Compared with the rest of the world, my parents' love for me seems to have been virtually unconditional. Starting at the age of 4, I began to experience problems relating to people who were not my parents, and I think most people have experiences roughly similar to mine. I often felt inferior in some way to the person I was with, and occasionally I was bullied or teased and I did not react favorably and I didn't fight back much either. I was just unhappy about it. I also had good experiences. At age 7 I acquired a best friend. And when I went to Kindergarten and first grade I had a friend or two then also. I spent a lot of time with my older brother and had a variety of experiences with him: some good and some not-so-good.
When I became a teenager I had greater difficulties with some of the boys my own age, and my adjustment involved some alienation. (Here, at first I wrote: "I became somewhat isolated for a year or two." But that's not quite true. It's more like an emotional distancing, and perhaps wasn't quite that long.) I lived at home and went to school but I vowed to stop attempting to make friends. Another major change was when I went to college and started having friends there. (That sentence too is slightly editted from what it was originally. It's hard to summarize one's own life!)
Third Part: The World Of Work:
The world of work is much related to the world of people, that is, relationships between people. But work also has competency regarding things, and some self-discipline and self-respect just about the self and the work together. I've been working part-time, such as in the summers, since I was 14, and full-time since I was a young adult. Some of the work, starting when I was 14, was occasionally hard work, (Here, at first I wrote: "such as mowing lawns in the heat, hauling hay, shoveling gravel, and long hours working on a farm.". But I didn't shovel much gravel and the really physically hard part was just some of the hay hauling.) Overall it's not hard like what poor people endure, but enough to be a significant experience. (I've also slightly changed that sentence.) I was glad when school started because then I could rest in a classroom instead of being out working on a farm. Working on the farm involved feeling incompetent or inadequate some of the time, and that was the hardest part of it. I didn't feel that way as much in school, although school, even just academic work itself, is sometimes rather onerous and difficult. Since I was about 15 or 16, September and October have been my favorite months, largely because to me they mean less hard work and less time feeling inadequate or on edge about work.
Fourth Part: The World Of All Things:
Starting at age 22, I began thinking of the physical universe. In my mid-40s I became more aware of social issues. In my late 50s (which is now) I have philosophical ideas about mortality. In between I've had some thoughts about religion and I'm developing my own unreligious spirituality.
As for the physical universe, I think of it with a rudimentary concept of evolution. I think things evolve. This means that some things tend to last longer than other things; some things reproduce or otherwise stay around a long time; and the existence of a universe such as this one is very plausible, not requiring any miracle. As for God, which is an entity many people talk about, so I might as well address it: God may evolve just as other things evolve. God may have evolved from more rudimentary things. I think that's actually what happens. As for people and societies: they evolve too.
Fifth Part: The Nature Of People:
Generally, people want to be good people, though some probably don't formulate that concept about themselves. Generally, a person will want to think of himself or herself as being "good" or competent or lovable. So why do people do bad things? Bad behavior usually comes from errors. After a while, a very-bad-behaving person gives up on himself or herself and just starts vegetating: not really fully alive, but going to work and going through life by habit.
I learned that no matter how bad an act is, there is some circumstance where I could imagine myself doing it. This is an important lesson, and I think I was beginning to learn it in early adulthood, but have gradually become more aware of it through mid-life. Once you can imagine yourself doing the bad thing, a bad behavior which you despise when you see somebody else doing it, then, as you imagine yourself capable of the same thing, you can learn to empathize a little with the bad-behaver, and realize that he or she is a person too, like oneself is a person. I'm not really good with social relationships (No, that's not quite right. It would be more accurate to say that part of my adolescence was difficult, not really because of a lack in myself, but mostly because it really was an odd or difficult situation, and I cared enough about it to make it a memory.) (remember the alienation when I was a teenager); but I can imagine a lot, and I can see that even my enemies have human feelings and have a lot in common, as human beings, with myself. (Additional note: I don't feel so empathetic all the time! What I'm saying is that in quiet philosophical moments I can understand in principle that adversaries and bad-behaving people are still persons with a common humanity with myself. This really is an important lesson and does have practical effects, but it's a gradual awakening, like personal maturity. What I'm contributing that I haven't heard elsewhere is the idea that oneself might do very bad behavior too, depending on circumstances. That is the lesson which leads to understanding.)
Sixth Part: Other Topics:
There's a little more, but I'll save that for the summary section.
Summary:
So all that is how things work. I described how a person may awaken to the world (as a child), how things come into being (what I call evolution), how spirituality and God are also part of that same elemental evolutionary process, and how people are and what we all care about (being loved or being good).
Now, supposing I'm wrong about all of it; even then, as I fall to the wayside as chaff, the universe can move on without me. I am not so big an obstacle as to mess it up much.
We yearn for something which is hard to define. A lot of us call it God. My notion about God is that God is compassionate enough to be at least reasonable with us, and sensible enough to furnish, or to not interfere much with, a rational universe. Suppose I mess up badly, such as becoming a terrible sinner. God has a way around that, or a way to integrate that, such that the universe will go on. I might be in a bad way, but it will never be so horrible that I have to have nightmares about it. God allows everyone, even the worst of us, to eventually have peace, if only by an obliterating death, and maybe better than that.
