Predisposed To Reflection

Grandpa was an alcoholic, but then he found God, which apparently fixed all of his problems. Apparently. Grandpa's use of God always seemed more mechanic, more a grim determination than an act of love, which in turn would shade my own sensibilities regarding spirituality and religion.

I was thinking about this while I was walking to the theater the other day. Grandpa apparently wasn't a cuddly and entertaining drunk. And when this is your basis of normalcy, this becomes your comfort zone, drunken antagonism and chaos. My aunt went and found herself a drinker to marry, cementing not only her fate but the idea that women look for their fathers when they get married. Years down the line, I was meeting up with my cousin from this union for a night of drunken revelry.

"You know he might be an alcoholic, it runs in his blood," my mother advised.

I wanted to tell her that it then, in fact, ran in my blood as well. And on thinking of that, I thought about how I would do things differently from my grandfather if things deteriorated to the point where I simply had to drink. Well, I have a little more flair than my namesake, I'm a little brighter, I would hope that I wouldn't lower myself to plain old abuse of my family.

But I realized, you can't outclass or outthink a genetic predisposition.

This opened a door to thinking about all the things that I'm genetically predisposed to, the things that my genealogical map has laid in my way, and how these stolid markers mix with the chaos of chance that occurs with just living and works to shape who I really am, not just what my blood makes me. Then I thought about the hot sparks thrown with the collision of these dispositions and those sometimes innocuous moments of living. I thought of a galaxy of moments that had changed my life; things as small as tasting sage for the first time, things as large as watching my son enter the world.

I can make myself dizzy sometimes. For a moment I wanted to lay down on a warm lawn somewhere in the dark and look back, look up at that glittering galaxy of life and just have a moment to take it in before it went and got bigger on me.