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08/26/12 - 8:53 p.m.

When I was a teenager, I didn't want my parents to influence me. But I think, now, that I'd already picked up at least one habit when I was in grade school. It was an unhealthy faith in absolutes...

My dad wasn't particularly "actualized," as they used to say in the 1970s. He didn't translate his wants into a reality, and had this 1950s-style faith in Dale Carnegie-type stuff -- working diligently, sucking up to people, hustling for promotions. When I was in grade school, I think there was a time when I thought that was the way to live your life -- to find some external absolute which you'd adhere to, for guidance, in life.

The thing is the 1970s was a "do your own thing" decade. And part of that was simply to move into the space that was created by all the new freedoms from the 1960s. In any case, the one thing you didn't have were absolutes.

I think it took me a while to realize that...

UPDATE: I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone the other day, and I smiled to myself that he was grappling for the flimsiest ways to explain the modern world and why we are the way we are. And it occurred to me that I didn't have any better answers. The real answer is self-awareness and self-confidence, because then you don't cling to these exotic explanations about where we're at and why we are the way we are. Because we'd just know who we are, and that carries its own truth.

Ernest Hemingway once said that good "is what I feel good after." It was considered post-modern at the time, but now it's considered part of a well-rounded approach to life!

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