It was 2 ½ years ago that I posted what a stumbling block I had and did not know  I carried.  When something was so obvious to me, all evidence pointed, words written, pictures and all, yet sitting across the table was one shaking his head no.  I was reading into the subject.  It did not say, whatever.  That was not so.

I thought it was a matter of will, of laziness in opening a book, one didn’t care to think.  I was told I was wrong in what I thought.  I had no credentials to back me up but I did have a yearning to learn that was not quiet with open books nightly when my world slept and I ventured into what I learned in my dotage was Kabbalah, where Sages did not die.

We were taught in first grade all are born equal.  All brains are equal.  I believed until I was about eight and waited all night for Santa Claus.  When he did not appear toward morning I crawled into bed next to my sister and knew it was one of the feel good things big people said.  Not true but feel good.

When I first read Jean Auel’s Clan of The Cave Bear I thought it was a good work.  When I picked it up the second time, I did not stop reading for 2 days.  It told me in spades what I was unable and blind to understanding; that thought processes are different, not lesser or better, but diverse.  The one telling me I was wrong in thinking was as wrong as I was thinking it was a matter of will, of intent.  

Creb, the Mogur, or shaman comes to understand that Ayla , the young girl rescued  because of climate calamity was able to conceptualize and learn his tribe’s language  and behavior because  her brain was open in ways his was not to learn hers.

I felt his pain concluding this.  New knowledge must rearrange all preconceived thought and demands work.  One’s entire belief system, philosophy, must be reconsidered in new light.

His people hammered through hundreds of generations to survive in bleak conditions while Ayla’s had come from conducive conditions allowing growth and less isolation.  Her abilities were evident so they aroused jealousy.  Just as any yearning desire to learn something adopts a discipline destined to manifest, discipline often seeds resentment in the onlooker.

Tribal groups often settled fertile grounds and mated with similar tribes.  Peaceful affiliations though different meant growth evolved.  Isolation meant incestuous unions and less growth.  Evolution stagnates when different means discrimination.

So culture, genetic anguish, environment, simple poverty and a worst lack, no inner motive to race the morning to begin its dance, puts the brain on hold.  Do I take away hope?  I do not.  Intensity of purpose. . . should have you online  to get Clan of the Cave Bear.  What a rich two days for me. Learning should be the infection that I would hope be contagious.

Understanding even a little bit does not make it easier,  just lessens the frustration.