Tuesday 4 September 2001

Pic of the day: Actually, some of the pictures here might be familiar to my third oldest brother, who lived nearby for two years before I moved here. For example this old Åros bridge. Perhaps we have more in common than I use to think. Or perhaps not. The most important place we live is inside our heart, and who knows that landscape except ourself?

Family affairs

I guess I had an inferiority complex when I was a kid. As well I should; for I was inferior. I was the youngest of four (all boys), but more than that: Even for my age, I was weaker and clumsier and dumber and less mature. It didn't exactly improve over time: I had childhood asthma, which kicked in and almost killed me if were physically active. I learned that lesson well. When I started school, I was soon picked upon by all the bullies. I started to avoid school whenever possible. This did nothing to improve anything, I guess. Though eventually my mother taught me some girlish skills, like baking. I was too clumsy and impatient for sewing and knitting, though. In retrospect, that may not be such a big loss.

Intellectual skills were highly valued in my family, and here of course I was the dummy. Despite my most desperate attempt, I was nothing more than a laughing stock. When I came to school, I discovered that the other kids were far less intelligent than me again ... but here being smart earned you negative point values. The only important skills were fighting and football.

***

That was then, this is now. Looking back, I can see how I spent much of my life trying to be special, to be more than human, to show that I was worthy. At the same time, I did not really believe that I would amount to anything. I was and would always be small and weak and clumsy and a failure.

But time passes, and the human spirit and the genetic code both unfold over time, eventually eclipsing more and more of the circumstances that towered over us when we were small. I was 15, I think, when I started to realize my free will and flex its "muscles". It would still take as much time again to deal with the secret powers in the dark of my subconscious. I'm not sure I'm finished yet. But a lot has changed.

When I was a kid, I had to play the hand I was dealt. No more. I have traded cards so often that I am largely my own invention. Or let me say it this way: I was a second hand creation, like a golem and a robot. I did not have the knowledge and understanding to reprogram myself. But I got such an understanding, and I did reprogram myself. The parts of the original me that remain (and there are quite some) are there largely because I liked them too much to trade them in. That does not mean they are all good. Laziness, for instance, is not a good thing per se. But I liked it so much that I kept quite a bit of it. I can't blame anyone else for it now, or even fate. I have made so many choices that I am responsible for my own life to a very high degree.

***

Tonight, God willing, I catch the train for the west coast of Norway. There I hope to meet my brothers and their family, and our earthly father. I am not without doubts. The closer it gets, the more it seems like a bad idea. It would seem that we have followed the same river of time downstream, but on different sides. And somehow the river has got so wide that there is no crossing over. There is no point where this happened. It was all so gradual. We used to write, my mother and I. But gradually the letters were fewer and fewer. I remember in particular that I sent fewer and fewer of the letters I wrote.

Now, even though I can go there in the flesh, a part of me feels like a ghost there, haunting a place where I no longer belong. I have changed so much, it is hard for me to know who to be anymore: The one I was, or the one I am.

My brothers do not tower over me anymore. We would probably be friends now, if they lived nearby. We still have much in common. But I don't really know them; perhaps I never really did. And I guess that despite my online journal, they don't know me all that well either.

I was a spoiled brat for a reason. I wonder, if my brothers had their childhood cursed with a life threatening illness, would they have become like me? If I had not, would I have become like them? And if so, like who of them? I am not so sure. I think things have evened out a lot. Yes, our paths did diverge. But I continued to choose a path that took me further away. (To the point where I hardly even like country music anymore. Now that is a testament to bone-deep change.)

So to sum it up, I don't really think I make this trip to look for family. I am my own family now, for good and bad. I may only have fulfilled half of the biblical commandment that a "man shall leave his father and mother and stay with his wife"; but I have fulfilled that half to a double measure. What is gone, is gone. I am not so much looking for family, but friends. I hope I'll find some. I hope I can be one.

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Because I will be travelling all of tomorrow, the diary may be delayed and short and fluffy. Apologies in advance.