"Basically, nature wants you to have babies. Society wants you to pay to raise wage-earners, taxpayers, and cannon fodder for their wars. ...Saying no to that dictate of nature bestows quite a bit of power that you would have invested in off-spring that can be directed elsewhere. So if you decide not to have kids, pick another twenty year project and get busy." --Franis Engel on pandalous.com, one of many thoughtful commenters discussing The Baby Question
My Spidey Sense is tingling! I read this today after posting yesterday's ramblings about, among other things, my ongoing fight with/against/? my body and nature. I offhandedly speculated that by having will, discipline, and determination win out over natural and biological urges, I and my kind might be acquiring some sort of spiritual warrior status. Nuns and monks and yogis can surpass their "natural" urges, so why not us?
But I thought Engel's sentence above very interesting. "Saying no to that dictate of nature bestows quite a bit of power..." When in the thick of The Baby Issue, I don't feel powerful. I feel like I'm in a deathmatch, wrestling with an angel or a demon, feeling the fragmentation of my mind/will and my body/biology. That deathmatch is eating up much of my time and energy. And yet here is the idea that it might bestow on me, on us, a special kind of power, personally and in the world.
As anyone who's ever gone through serious grief or serious struggle knows, these are sources of personal transformation, greater empathy with others going through their own struggles, greater determination, the realization that one can get through many tough times, and suchlike. Engel suggests that we not only earn these lessons and the "power" that comes with them, but a level of different power than parents can have, simply because we have chosen a different path and therefore have more energy to expend on something besides our children.
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