When born in a static culture, one can largely follow in one’s parent’s footsteps. In such a world, barring invasion or changes to one’s environment, things are largely unchanged from generation to generation. One has seen one’s father and mother, one’s uncles and aunts, pass through each stage of life before you. From birth to death, one is guided all the way.
For those of us in dynamic cultures, however, we break new ground with every step. I am speaking in sweeping generalities, of course—each of us meets the world differently, even when embedded within an apparently unchanging world. On the other hand, even as the world changes around us, there we are, constant: men, women, desiring to birth and raise families, to create, to leave a legacy behind us so that, even after death, we live on. My father dodged horse-drawn ice wagons as a boy, and on this day that I started this essay, we wondered if debris from a Chinese rocket, in uncontrolled free-fall, will fall upon our heads.
My father was forty-one years old when I was born. As a young man, he achieved his dream of being a lawyer. However, he was an idealist, and couldn’t tolerate the compromises he had to make, particularly in regards to truth, in order to function within the American legal system. After the 2nd world war, his father invited him to join him in the family business, and that was intolerable in other ways. He soon quit, and worked for the rest of his life honorably, doing a job he did not like, to ensure that his family would live well and safely. He practiced little law, mostly pro bono, and mostly provided information on real estate transactions for businesses (a rudimentary version of what Google and Facebook provide to customers today)
In between those two periods, he was a spy.