Born with potential.

Its been a while....so heres a looooooong one!

The day before The Famous Five left for Kalbarri we went to the local supermarket to buy our ham sandwiches, a slice of cake and ginger beer! We also brought fresh items to put in an antique camping fridge that could be powered from the boot of the car – I was a bit nervous about this fridge as it had blown up the kitchen electrics at my sisters place after being filled with beer for Christmas and New Year gatherings, anyhow I gave it a trial run and it seemed to be running sweet. Back to the shop…. So we were merrily filling our trolley, chatting about our menu for camp, negotiating on treats and checking off our list as we went. One item that we had missed was noodles for the stir fry, I piped up that I knew which aisle it was likely to be (being the alert and attentive person I am) so I skipped off and found them swift as you like. I came back to where I had left the girls and lent into the trolley to put my noodles down but suddenly felt slightly uncomfortable as it seemed that all the items I thought we had purchased had vanished and been replaced by some tins of cat food and fresh food wrapped in paper sealed with a purchase label. After momentarily thinking this was a Famous Five mystery I looked up and found my head was in the wrong trolley…. but relieved to see the lady whose trolley I had mistaken for ours was in fact still ordering from the fresh meat counter and was unaware of the stranger trying to add noodles to her shopping. I causally stood up and saw no one had spotted my error and went around the corner to see Kaela- J with a Ribena bottle in her hand making her approach to argue why this particular item was vital for our trip. I laughed at myself (not for the first or last time) as I retold the event to Hayley and the girls and wondered what would have happened if the lady was standing at her trolley as I wondered up and what she might have said to me?

This tendency to for me to act in some random, illogical, ditsy and sometimes quite funny situations has other effects on my behaviour for example when there is a more critical action to carry out like locking doors, putting the handbrake on the car, making sure I have a credit card in my wallet after using the cash point, I will often go back and check what I have done….sometimes twice maybe even three on occasions, but definitely not four. Four times and I would probably be labelled OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and be treated as one with ‘special needs’. My brain is also capable of creating a kind of social confusion - sometimes I need time alone and withdraw (I am an introvert) and look withdrawn and another time I seek the company of others and enjoy conversation (ha ha…maybe I am an extrovert). For me these are examples of the immense mystery, power and complexity within the human brain. The power to save life and destroy life, to communicate, to love, to make love, emanates from the human brain. The impulses, chemicals, the stimulus’s that create and cause action and reaction, the storage of memory that shapes or reshapes decisions, the influences of culture, belief, and the impact of the actions of others. Acknowledging and maybe attempting to understand this creation and the creator and the uniqueness of each person and their inherent potential may begin to undermine the dominant culture (via education) to measure label and categorise people. In turn this may reshape the narrative of relationships and associations with others.

For example prejudice, discrimination and racism are themes of conversation I have had in Australia (given the relatively short history of colonisation) and seen on the virtual world (via Facebook). Prejudice can be defined as 'an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.'(http:dictionary.reference.com) This maybe because there is a threat/fear to a person’s belief/custom or because it reinforces the person’s security in themselves and that who and what they are is ‘normal’ (if there is such a thing). There can also be an illusion of ‘knowing’ somebody and therefore judgements are justified, however I am not sure that I fully understand myself sometimes given the examples at the beginning! So if I don’t fully understand myself how certain can I be in my judgement of another person that I may have never met or only seen socially say for a few hours in a week or month. Judgements generated from these associations evolve through gossip, the media, and collective experiences  – they are often elaborated and exaggerated into impressive myths that can be damaging to the person/group and in the worst cases catastrophic (superior race ideology). In this way any prejudice or deficit of another builds walls and divides between people.

If every human is born with potential or ‘born in the image of God’ (or the creator) then they are worthy of respect until they give a reason to withdraw that respect, just because someone is Aboriginal, Gay, Straight, Christian, Muslim, Atheist or Jedi (or a combination of all these) it isn’t a reason not to respect them and their potential, perhaps they have something that may be of use to me at one time, or in the extreme maybe even save my life (The film ‘Crash’ highlights this). Perhaps I have a part to play in someone fulfilling the potential they were born with and maybe I need many different people to fulfil my potential. An example of this is in the story of Jesus (a Jew, prophet, messiah, son of God, good man depending on belief) meeting a Samaritan woman by a well in an area called Samaria. He showed the woman respect by asking her for a drink from the water she came to draw from the well (this was unusual as Jews did not associate with Samaritans). Jesus then had insight into the women’s life that she had had four husbands and the man she was with now was not her husband – he didn’t offer her marriage counselling or tell her to go and sort her marriage out and then come back…. but to come closer to God. This is an example of how one person (Jesus) is maybe looking to the potential in the person and ignoring the divides between the two groups exposed the prejudices that existed.