I was pretty hard on Cinderella\u2019s sperm donor. I think it is ok to judge him a little bit. The story, set in our times, might give more context to make him forgivable. Or it might judge him harsher than I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mostly, I judge him for lack of awareness on the consequences of his decisions. For the purposes of this letter, I am assuming we have a Cinderella story playing out in our modern culture1<\/a><\/sup>Since it is our culture I am commenting on here, that makes sense to me.<\/span>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I get frustrated with people when, in my opinion2<\/a><\/sup>It isn\u2019t really a humble opinion<\/span>, they are not paying enough attention to the consequences of the actions they are going to take. It can be as simple as a great story I remember from when BigOne was tiny. They told us they had brushed their teeth. I doubted them. So, I went to inspect the toothbrush and it was dry. They had not thought about IF they had brushed their teeth, the toothbrush would be wet. And thus, they learned to think more about if the lie was plausible before lying to me3<\/a><\/sup>I would have loved the lesson to be NOT to lie to me, but I think I explained it a little too much.<\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being hyper aware isn\u2019t always good for me or the people in my world either. The image that comes to my mind is a college student who has been awake for 36 hours preparing for a final in a tough class. The student is so focused and aware of how they will need to perform in the class, they are losing the ability to perform at all4<\/a><\/sup>This happened once to a fellow graduate student when I was working on my MSEE. He passed out in the middle of the exam. As a side note, his passing out took my awareness away from my own exam paper<\/span>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If I function as too aware of my interactions with the world, I end up missing opportunities. And sometimes awareness of our world is too much because there are too many sad things to see and not have the power to change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I struggle back and forth across the awareness good\/awareness bad spectrum, I become too aware of the spectrums of behaviors which of course leads to a fight or flight reaction. So, employing one of the trendy meditation techniques I have learned recently, I kind of force myself to pop out. Only from observation can I ask the question, \u2018What am I trying to achieve with my awareness?\u2019 And in the context of a modern fairytale, what do I wish Cinderella\u2019s father had achieved?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n