It All Adds Up...

...To Something

I was a silly kid.  I don’t know what got into me sometimes.  I would go up to a fellow kid on the playground and ask him for a penny.  And more often than not, he would give me one.  And then I would go up to four other kids on the same mission.  And with five cents, I could buy a fudgesicle, or thereabouts.  Each one of them individually wouldn’t feel the pinch.  But still, it was theft.  I never intended to pay them back.  But then, it was up to each one of them to choose, whether or nat to enter into my little con game.  Although I may have been trading on my ‘goodwill’ with them, to get away with my heist.  So the onus was still on me, in those transactions.  No getting away from it.  I was the one at fault in the matter.

And speaking of such matters, I remember reading in one of Ayn Rand’s books where she shared with her readership about her and her family’s difficult days in the former Soviet Union, when they were reduced to a job of bottling some sort of pills, and, to make a bit of a living, they would put 49 of them in a bottle that was supposed to have 50 in it.  Not much of a ‘deal’.  But it all added up.  To put some essential food on the table, in that case.  

And who’s to say where my stupid little activity, in elementary school, was generated from?  Could I have had a past life where the same sort of thing could have been on my plate, of the difference between starving and making a go of it??  And would I resort to the same sort of activity, to ‘make ends meet’???…  

And speaking of numbers, and their potential for being involved in life or death situations, and of past lives. and their potential effect on our actions in our current lives: I also have a ‘habit’ of counting things.  Constantly.  Especially of people.  The number of people in a group.  Any group, anywhere, any time.  It is so pervasive a habit in me - of ‘mine’ - that I have wondered about it.  To the point of wondering seriously if I had been responsible for a small group of individuals in a past life - say, my own children - and I overlooked one once, and that action of mine resulted in the loss of one of them.  And I have never ‘forgotten’ it.  And never want to be in that sort of situation again, where I was responsible for such a loss. 

And perhaps that is also why I am such a staunch defender of the Individual, as opposed to looking on the individual as just being part of a collective.  Like ants.  And I will resist - to the death - anyone who attempts to make of us humans just, like, ants.  Or cattle.  Beasts of burden.  To carry loads, for the state.  And simply to be done away with, as soon as they can no longer ‘carry their weight’.

So maybe my silly little ‘habit’ of adding little things up, to make a larger whole, wasn’t so silly after all.  But was part - and an essential part - of my schooling.  In this classroom of Life.  For aspiring gods.

Not to overlook anything, in our education.  To even the most minute detail.

For our graduation.

A stage of which

is 

coming up.

Out of elementary school.

Into

the higher grades.

One - little (seemingly) - step at a time.