“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.” – Jack London
There are a lot of things no one warns you about when you’re young and innocent. Death, sickness, taxes, man’s inhumanity to man… chin hairs. The list is endless. We’re really bad at being comfortable with the unknown, yielding to the unexpected, or accepting anything that doesn’t fit our desired life script.
The generation that survived the Great Depression didn’t come through unscathed. According to family history, one of my ancestors kept his cash hidden at home because he didn’t trust “the banks.” Others tell stories of their grandmas keeping every bit of string, every rubber band, every scrap of cloth. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” wasn’t just a motto, it was a way of life.
My parents’ generation — the Boomers — endured multiple assassinations of popular leaders, the Vietnam war, race riots, and Watergate, among other tumultuous social events. Their takeaway? “Trust no one, especially the government.”
Covid created another massive disruption for another generation, and the rage and sense of being victimized that emerged from that loss of freedom and safety (and not being able to find toilet paper at the store) feels similar to the way my grandparents talked about the Depression and WWII, or the way my parents talked about the deaths of thousands of their cohort in a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map.
Each successive generation picks up the scars of the generations that have gone before them and adds those schemas to their own experiences.
We’re all dealing with layers upon layers of trauma — global, national, regional, cultural, personal. These events rob us of our sense of security, mess with our comfort zone, and twist our reality. And they color not only the way we live our lives but the way we raise our children.
Unless we make the choice to course correct, we’re going to hand off a baton full of bitterness, hatred, blame, and fear. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We’ve each been dealt a hand of cards. Some of those cards are shared (Covid), some are local or regional (wolves) and some are personal. How we play our individual hand has a role in the cards our children and grandchildren inherit. What we leave them should be the best cards — faith, empathy, love, courage, kindness, honesty, etc.
