I didn’t use to think of Life as a puzzle, and maybe it’s due to my jigsaw hobby (200 piece puzzles are now challenging), but reflecting on my memories and perceptions–maybe dreams–I am pausing to reflect.

An indelible memory to which I’ve referred previously is the scene from the 1973 movie Soylent Green, portraying the drama of overpopulation, among other things.  (Overpopulation on Earth in 2023 no longer exists, only elderly overpopulation, which fits by comparison). The scene is visually beautiful, being where the elderly food supply get to visit at their scheduled demise.  They sit in a dome surrounded by breath-taking images (no pun intended) of a disappearing or disappeared nature.  It’s a beautiful place, which perhaps accounts for it being so memorable.

I recall a history of parenting practices in history and also the part of my childhood in which I was not allowed to ask for what I wanted, not even to hint.  I recall phoning home from a birthday party to confess I had eaten something after I had dropped it on the floor…And in the sixth grade turning myself in as a Safety Patroller for chewing gum on post. (I then was given some kind of demerit).

Miraculously, in graduate school I discovered thinking and therapy.  A later psychotherapist asked me what I had gotten from my first psychotherapist, and without a pause I said, “Love.”

That brings me to the overwhelming goal of competition, from sibling rivalry to Little League Big League to…you know…tooth and claw, money and power…liberal versus conservative versus MAGA; corporations versus humans…

What if instead of competition we were raised to respect and value ourselves…and then others… If we were set upon the path to value and hear each other from birth to death, at ground level, neighborhood level?  That would mean learning to value our own selves because we were raised to believe in ourselves without having to prove to ourselves and each other that we are winners in the competition:  the competition to make others and ourselves believe we are okay human beings.

P.S. My grandmother on the farm was already okay.