Osmosis

Life. Your own life. That mixture of hopes and dreams mixed up in events. 

The orthodoxy that one grows by osmosis, the assimilation of ideas and experiences which form your character and temper your mind to believe certain things  has a pleasing, almost Darwinian ring to it
Where you are born and to whom you are born is immensely important in this process of development but it casts you for a part you may not wished to play.

The surroundings and the feedback from those surroundings may have a positive or a negative effect. It may contort you into a struggle which is still being fought and for which there is probably no satisfactory answer. Square pegs into round holes comes to mind and a life spent trying to justify the fit. 

When you were very young and unharmed by opinion, your life had as many paths and many opportunities. Given the right tools you could have achieved almost anything. 

Place a violin in the hands of a three year old or set the child on an exercise regime to run under 10sec for the 100m and one can achieve a series of goals that would mark that person out for a measure of success in life. 

Let life unfurl in a laissez faire, non-interventionist role and the outcome is like roulette, a game of chance.
Is it then, in early childhood where we are failed, often by high minded experts and their attitude towards discipline which is kept off the agenda for fear of breaking little Jimmies the 'spirit'. 

This thing called "spirit" some would describe as an "effervescence" having no real meaning, other than the  romanticised concept of what a child's early years should be like. 

We see this spirit or at least one aspect of it, in the consequence of the refusal to 'dictate to a child a course of action you know is for the best'. The tantrum which many ill disciplined children display is the result of not providing guidelines, what is acceptable and non acceptable, and it could be argued the greater the guiding hand the better adjusted the child.

Are we nothing more than a fiction a story which could have been so much better told if the plot had been worked out beforehand.

One of the successes of the Jewish nation is the understanding that success comes through training and repartition. The rules that decide your path in a good Jewish household are tied up in religious dogma but the results rarely fail. The boy or girl is not free to experiment willy nilly, they have a responsibility to the tribe which is larger and more precious than to themselves alone. It is this 'hand holding' and 'guidance' which prevents the child getting lost in its own world. The spirit is not destroyed but moulded to a greater objective and the secret of success both as an individual and as a nation is the acceptance of objectives which lie outside ones own private experience or control.