Historical backgrounds matter

Going Back | Clarissa's Blog

One thing that seems like adaptation facilitated by the ancestors in me is that I scan the environment, whichever environment I am in, for danger.   I'm always highly vigilant, no matter what the environment or how peaceful it seems.   I'm actually quite interested in finding where the danger spots are, too, and thoroughly investigating them and bringing back reports.   I get bored if I can't do this.  

Also -- and this is less pleasant -- I always expect to hear that something horrific has happened close to me and that someone has died in an unexpected way.   I have that feeling too, which sometimes is damp or almost disappears but other times rises to the surface quite dramatically.   I don't like it when the phone suddenly rings, for instance.

I think a lot of this has to do with my family's background on my father's side -- and oddly enough, world war 2.   But also with African circumstances and a living enmeshed in cultural and historical instability.

I cannot see how backgrounds do not matter.  I agree also with one of the comments in this thread about Jews being pushed to academic excellence.  But with me it is the excellence of the survivor -- knowing how to read the environment very, very well indeed.   That is why I am often surprised when there is a natural disaster or something else and people are taken by suprise en masse.   I can't imagine anything more degrading or offputting than allowing oneself to be taken by suprise by anything.   Even if you die, you have to kind of expect it -- or, what is wrong with you?

I don't adapt at all to a state of mind that says it is our right to sit here and chew cud comfortably.   I'm not comfortable with comfort.  it irks me.  Life is passing you by.

So people find me very difficult to read because I do not want what they do, and then they take out their vengeance on me, which I always see coming.

But I can't change or adapt to what is conventionally normal.  Even watching very normal people have their very minor adventures without seeming vigilant annoys the hell out of me.   For instance, the modern versions of Doctor Who, which are nothing more than Cinderella stories, cause me to go out of my mind at the ineptitude of the characters in not taking more care.   They just want to be whisked away and put down again.   But they don't look around them or guard themselves.  There's a thunderous stupidity about this, which detracts from the mind's abilty to process its own material.