Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you

That is one of my favorite lines from the Matrix. The lines proceeding it are:

"You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin...I'm going to show [these people] a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

I know few things in life with crystal clear certainty. I'll tell you what I do know though. I know how progress works. I know that no one truly cares whether or not I accomplish the goals I set for myself. I mean that to say that they do care but they have no internal control over whether or not I get off of my ass. To truly care that another human betters themselves is something left for parents and significant others. Even then there is only so much we can truly do. I know that my fate is controlled by how much I prepare myself for opportunity and then whether or not that preparation has made me able to pull the trigger when that chance comes my way.

I know that my mother bred me with the badge of The Wolf from Pulp Fiction, "I fix problems." It's really the only thing that I'm good at, crisis management. It's the day to day stuff that I have problems resolving. But you give me a problem and I'm like a pig in shit, the bigger the problem, the happier I am. There is no circumstance I am better suited for. This is my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. Age and experience it seems have tempered me a bit to learn to choose my battles.

The problem with raising a person with an understanding of fixing problems and allowing them to believe that that extends to people is the boredom. Eventually, they'll fix the shit around them and then they go searching. Dogs will hunt. They dig up the past and try and fix that too. My father is a fuck up. Other than that he's a great guy. My mom is a fuck up too. At some point in the past my father was less of a fuck up than my mother and for a time he was the iron hand of God that fixed my mothers problems. Problems remembering how to laugh, to enjoy, to raise children, to have stability. He fixed those for her and for a time life was good. The inevitable though eventually overtook reality. The bubble wasn't sustainable and it burst. I studied this history with veracity. I wanted to undo what had been done, what they couldn't manage to keep. But I can't time travel so I looked for it around me. I looked for my mom in another face. I thought that if I could fix what my father broke I could fix the things wrong with me.

You cannot undo the past and you cannot fix people. How many times must I learn this lesson? Salvation comes at your own hands and by your own choices. There is no personal Jesus to take on your sins. We nail our frailties onto our own cross made with our own sweat and we choose the whens and the ifs of impaling. "Where we go from here is a choice I leave to you." People must choose for themselves. Sure, a kick in the ass at an appropriate moment is a grand gift to give but a kick in the ass to someone not already moving will result in them falling flat on their face and then they'll blame you for their fall. That I can't wrap my mind about this is why I have nightmares. Fear is such an ugly demon. Fear of success, fear of that success leaving. Fear of not being helped, fear that once helped that they help will come at too steep a price, fear that the help will leave. Fear of need, fear of consumption by that need until you don't recognize yourself. Fear. It makes you act out, makes you inflict ache so that the outside world will reflect the inside one.

I am a fucked up person trying simply to wake up on time this morning. That is enough for me. The rest of it is a distraction from a group of tasks that I'm frightened to tackle and needs that I am afraid to address. To do so would ground me in the present and some days that is such a scary prospect. No past to pontificate about, no future to fantasize on. Just the simple and frank present to work in. How utterly frightening. How vitally necessary.