A place in the pack

Some people are born knowing their place. They grow up romping and play fighting right next to the same people that will bury them and for some this is enough to fill a lifetime. These people don't ask how you want your coffee. They just pour their Folgers into a cup and add sugar and milk, or some sort of powdered creamer that could last a hundred years on the counter if their people didn't drink it up.

Others set off on purpose and do the things their fathers did and their mothers talk about, or the things their mothers did and their fathers talk about,  hoping that one day they will fall out of the lessons and into a job, or a career that defines them. A thing that makes money, because they believe that money tells people who you are and where you stand in the pack. Sometimes they need to stand on rocks to be seen, but if you pile the money high enough, you don't need even that.

Then there are the people who just stumble around, like soft pieces of clay, playing blind man's bluff, taking on the shape of those things that touch them. Once they have enough shape they begin showing their colors and if the world likes them, or even hates them enough, they become the artists and dreamers, the lovers and teachers of life the way it is. Their place in the pack is often tenuous.

Life is forward facing. Not kind. Not mean. A series of steps moving inexorably forward and most people just fall into line hoping they won't be led into the marshlands and get sucked into an early death.

A few do seem to break and run and what happens to them seems like a dream come true to me. They write the books that have footnotes, produce the buildings whose angles startle us, build aqueducts to control the water -- and fly above the pack.