Trials and tribulations

Subject: Trials and tribulations.

I know of a father and son who live under the same roof but who the world and its meaning are so totally different that they might as well inhabit two different planets.
The father has strong opinions but feels at a loss to understand his son a teacher. The teacher has few if any interests outside teaching, he seems to fear the world and draws his substance from technical books, books which push out the frontiers of esoteric learning, not the novels which deal in the exploration of the human condition in all its profundity.  He is painfully shy and withdrawn and one wonders how on Earth he communicates to the children or his colleagues. Of course if his learning can be seen to bare fruit in the class then he must get pleasure out of that but the seed sown in the classroom to young children is so rudimentary and needs so much tendering that the disappointment must seem, 'par for the course'.
His father on the other hand had the ill fate to suffer a domineering father and a hair brained mother who's crazy arguments with her husband must have taken their toll on my friend. Lacking self esteem but he still passed his 'eleven plus' and went to grammar school where children normally flourish and became successful. My friend lacked that confidence that his education should have awakened in him and having left school embarked on a series of jobs which slowly declined his opportunities and shaded his judgement when it came to marriage. Looking for love and understanding he received in return quite a lot of spite and misuse.
Life has a habit of repeating itself unless the temperament of the child and the young adult is able to reassess the world around them and not judge events as being part of a cycle. We are all unique and although the glow diminishes with age the story we leave behind is special because no one wrote the script other than yourself. To be comfortable in your own skin is to see life as an exercise in what ifs. There is no fundamental format for life although many people fall into the trap of feeling there is and plough  a furrow which is what they think will please someone else.
Society in its craving for continuity try's to corral people into the straight jacket of appearing to be part of what society projects as the norm but then we all know, there is no such thing as the norm and one has to be stupidly pig headed to twist yourself into a character which is not you.