Formative influences in my life

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Info ] [ Mail ]

I grew up on a small dairy farm and attended a small one room country school through grade 8. I grew up milking cows and working in the fields and I am sure that kind of life had a strong formative effect on me. I grew up attending church and reading the Bible and that certainly had a very powerful formative effect on my life. There were several children of about my age at that country school that I was friendly with, traded comic books with, etc., but I have never been a person comfortable in parties or inclined toward close gregarious type relationships. I lived in a very small world then, the world of the farm, the church, and that small school. However, something was to come that was to have a very powerful transforming effect on me. What was that? It was the curriculum I took in my high school years. A year and a half of algebra, plain and solid Euclidean geometry, trigonometry, biology, physics, and chemistry. I was very impressed by Euclidean geometry and the accomplishments of the ancient Greek thinkers in that regard. However, the subject that had the deepest effect on me in high school was physics. I took it in my junior year. It was a difficult subject and it really made me think. It more than anything else made me a thinker. It had a transforming effect on me. I was really impressed by Sir Isaac Newton and his accomplishments. The law of universal gravitation. Who would ever have guessed that two material objects in the universe would exert an attraction on each other? How could they possibly do that?! (We know that they do but we still haven’t answered the question of why.) The same kind of force at a distance phenomenon occurs with electrical charges and with magnetism. What is behind this? We know it is true but we still don’t know why. I was really impressed by Archimedes and his accomplishments (like his principle on the buoyant force of a liquid). Almost every page of that physics book raised questions and provoked thought. I was impressed by the subject of physics. It is a great subject for thoughtful people. It changed my life. The subject was difficult and I put a lot of time into it. I was a very conscientious person who had a psychological need to understand every concept completely and there were always lots of questions raised that the physics book just didn’t go into. (The book presented the main facts and results but didn’t really go into the whys; in fact, the real whys are often still not known — but the book didn’t say that). In my senior year I took chemistry and it was also a very interesting subject.

Thus my background in mathematics, physics, and chemistry makes me different from that large group of people in this world who have never studied these subjects (a group that includes my parents). My background has given me an appreciation for the accomplishments of a lot of intellectual greats (such as Newton, Archimedes, Galileo, etc.) that a great many people in our world just don’t have. I was an A student in high school and at the top of my classes. The courses were hard and rigorous and put a lot of stress on me. Especially so because of a particular personality quirk of mine: the trait of “slowness”. [I am just slow. I was slow in grade school (my teacher told me I was as “slow as molasses in January”), slow in picking raspberries and cucumbers on our farm, etc. I am still slow. Unique in that way. When my wife has finished dinner I am still eating and only a third done.] The tests in high school and college were all time tests where you have only so long to finish them and my natural slowness caused real stresses for me in high school — and even more serious stresses in college. In addition, slowness has a stigma associated with it — the stigma of being stupid. So, because of this stigma, I had a psychological need to prove something to the world: prove that I wasn’t stupid. I was under great stress in high school and college and that stress had psychological consequences. In addition, to achieve my goals I became very highly focused (focused on the technical) and being too highly focused has psychological consequences. I felt mixed up and confused and what I really needed was to relax and turn my attention to life and things non-technical (but on the other hand, it was that high focus that enabled me to attain my objectives).

When I was in school my understanding of other people and mankind in general was poor. I realize that now. When I was young I always assumed that most people were much like myself. I assumed that they thought about as I did, felt about as I did, had outlooks and values similar to mine. As a consequence, I assumed most people were a lot more intelligent than they really are, a lot more honest than they really are, a lot more moral than they really are, etc. I gave most people a lot more credit than they deserve. Now I am struck by the great differences that you find in people.

Feb 2020