Timing or Refining?

Today’s blog materialized itself much faster than I would have expected, because the words that need to be written are too impatient to wait an entire week. It’s funny how some things take forever to come to fruition, while others are just bursting to come before their time. We as people are no different, and babies, for that matter, are infamous for their tendencies to not appear at the proper time.

"What's the most important aspect
of comedy? T I M I N G !"

A man whom I consider as my surrogate grandfather once told me that the perfect wine is the one given just the proper amount of time to ferment. “The sublime nectar”, he would call it, is incapable of lying; regardless if picked prematurely or aged for too long, “the wine will always whisper into your mouth with complete, unabashed honesty every time you take a sip"1.

      

        What he meant was wine tastes terrible if the timing is wrong, just as unpleasant as a bad joke. To him, the same rules apply to newborn children (somehow he never had any kids of his own). They are either premature and therefore immature, or stubbornly late and without any regard for timeliness.

           

       I disagreed with him, for the same reason I disagree with Louis C.K.² He’s no child development specialist, but rather a vulgar yet witty comedian who believes that how you treat a child in the early developmental stages is irrelevant, since they won’t remember a single unpleasant memory of that time period. My belief, echoed by many scientific theories, is that who we are has little to do with when we’re born. In truth, our genetic code allotted to us by our parents had a certain hand in it, but we’re also partially reliant upon the conditions in which we are formed and raised³. The old, never-ending argument of nature vs. nurture is indeed relevant; though your looks are determined by your DNA, the type of person you become is a variable prejudiced by the factors of your upbringing.

       

"Mom, can you read me this book?
Again?!"

The idea is that if you raise two children from the same parentage but with different methods, they can turn out quite different. As the youngest child, my parents employed many techniques they learned after raising my sister. While I was still a fetus, my mother would rub her stomach and gently hum polish lullabies. Other times, she would speak a few words to me of love and care, and though I could not hear them (the inner ear is only fully developed by the time the mother is 20 weeks pregnant ⁴), the general tone of her voice may have left an impression. When I was a young child of three or four, my father would read me stories from Dr. Seuss, or folkloric tales from his motherland, and I would often enjoy those bouts when he would play the part of bard, not so much for the plot line, but rather the simple act of reciting. As a result, I am more of a gregarious person than my sister, who always preferred to read stories independently and focus on the content of the account; she is somewhat more reserved than I, though admittedly more intelligent.
  

       

Can you spot the problem?

       Right around this point, if not before, you may be asking yourself why I bothered to write any of this at all (I know I have). What does this have to do with those fundamental Life Stages that shape us into the man or woman we strive towards? Well, it all comes down to what that vile comedian I spoke of earlier had to say. The type of person you become is dependent on the manner in which you were raised. If the foundations are sordid, so too will be the overall structure.

       I will always defend the axiom that who you are is largely up to your discretion, but the manner in which you perceive yourself is instilled by others, and once fermented, you had better hope the timing is right.

References:

¹ Henry Skinner, A Good Year

² Louis C.K. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESrVaKuChWU

³ Nature vs. Nurture http://genealogy.about.com/cs/geneticgenealogy/a/nature_nurture_2.htm

⁴ The inner ear http://www.babycenter.com/0_developmental-milestones-hearing_6509.bc