Moomooji and the Science of a Boy’s Survival

Moomooji and the Science of a Boy’s Survival
     by None for the Money

Moomooji, an Indian Guru, says that human hopes for the resolution of anxieties by way of the mind and reasoning inevitably fail. Our attempts at discovering such verities as truth, the right way to proceed, proper behaviour, solid footing and correct understanding are futile. The mind never gets it right. Simplicity of mind, suspicion of reasoning and a concomitant submission to the quiet, gentle, peaceful Universal Harmony, hold out for humans the only means of  receiving and experiencing joy and happiness. That said, I wish to present a bit of reasoning concerning my personal scrabbling to survive my early adolescence. 
      My coping stance with my mother was placation. Here is the sequence by which it occurred between us. Mother dominated our household. Somebody had to. She never failed to feed us three times a day, though not more than three. I do not ever recall having a snack made for the kids, say at nighttime before bed. We didn’t ever starve though. Mom had a solid, unwavering world view and home view: 1) The world is in a competition for your soul, so don’t sin!  2) The home needs all the kids to be there helping with the work around the place.” My jobs: weeding the garden, shovelling snow, mowing the lawns, sweeping  the basement, washing and waxing the kitchen and dining room floors, cleaning up the garage, and many others. Only now and then would I be granted an hour, not more (usually once a day) to play with Lorna, my neighbour and friend. Mom disliked most of the things that I thought of or said, so I said little, did as she asked me to do and hid my inner person from her. 
     I learned to cope in this placating way as well with everybody else, since it seemed to me that others also did not care much for my style and reasons and questions. Teachers for instance, almost inevitably found me to be an affront to them. Not because I challenged them vocally, but because of something in my eyes or something in my stance, or the fact that I stuttered and therefore looked like I might be needy, and was tall and skinny and the farthest thing from good-looking. Who has any idea? I know that the English teacher (later) and other teachers (earlier) had particular kids that they enjoyed and treated favourably, by which I mean with smiles and nods of the head, invitations to help in the classroom, kind comments on essays and assignments, greetings in the hallway and so many other forms of approval, but that “particular kid” was not myself. And that was not the experience either of many of the rural boys in the classrooms that I sat in.        Placation was the only way (outside of outright rebellion) that a boy such as myself, with ideas and imagination and energy, could ever hope to weather the storms that were the inevitable disapproval of those who had control over his future. 
     I learned to placate as a way of survival, as a way of not being spanked (emotionally, but also physically) every minute of the day in order to keep me in line and out of the way, and to teach me that I was not likable. And so not to try to get in with this or that teacher or this or that important student.
     Pretty females, for instance, never had any of these issues. They never had to placate. A smile for a teacher from such a favoured slim female would do just as well for her thriving as any year-long subservient placation by the “best forgotten,” would do just as well as any fruitless and unheeded bowing and scraping meant to achieve, for us ner-do-wells, invisibility and avoidance of the hostility (which lurked and loomed and threatened, like an overcast sky, in the eye-range of every adult everywhere) for the boy-purveyors of exuberance. The lovely ones, with their subcutaneous excess of softness, learned ease and dimples (and such-like other attractivenesses—many physical), did not seem to have to survive. Maybe they were the very embodiment of Universal Harmony! My mind couldn’t seem to work it out.