THE POWER OF PASSIVE @ AGGRESSIVE ness
Living in a world of continuous grief and strife, after celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday and on the doorsteps of Black History Month, I will be driven to share more thoughts from the "Seat of My Soul." While recognizing the infliction of book bands, I will emancipate a tidbit of personal history with a stroll of memories dating back to before starting school during school segregation.
I will begin with an analogy. Picture yourself being at the top of a snow-covered mountain. If you made a snowball and rolled it in the snow, a downward rotation would increase the size until weight and gravity would take over. Becoming a weighted mass of destruction if there's nothing to stop it, while "The rolling stone gathers no moss." In the autonomy of life, except for illness and death, grief coupled with strife is mostly a product of humanity. The belief system is the evolution of a learned environment, the psychological equivalent of a revolving snowball or rolling stone without the "Guidance Against the Odds."
From birth to (approximately) age six, a child's brain works differently than an adult's. At this age, the mind is like a sponge, soaking up vast amounts of information and habits from our mentors/role models, moral or immoral. Effortlessly, continuously, and indiscriminately without discernment. As we get older, becoming steadfast in our beliefs with instincts of survival without facetiousness.
In the 1940s and 50s, during my childhood, I encapsulated the words of my elders because, as a child, I was urged to be seen and not heard. Many of my elders in those days had little to no formal education but were teachers of wisdom. With the wit of a quote, their unwritten words would enunciate a lesson via what they called "Old Sayings." The term "sayings" conveyed an idea, an expression of wisdom or truth, usually handed down by earlier generations and through reading Aesop's Fables, encouraged by my mother, built upon my transitioning from one generation to another, which was the fertilizer in my curiosity. A steppingstone to the "Book of Proverbs" as I got older. The Books of the Bible, enunciated by my granddad, Charlie Hurt, was the pentacle, the magical evocation. Understanding a moral at the end of each Aesop fable gave clarity to a developing mind, the ethics, and the inequities of life. The epitome of passive aggressiveness.
The phrase "Curiosity is a flame" is a metaphor, a depiction of an "Old Saying." This metaphor depicts curiosity as a burning flame that fuels the desire to learn. The more I read, the hungrier I became. Just as a flame needs oxygen to thrive, curiosity drives the pursuit of knowledge. Banding books cuts off the oxygen to the fire of life.
"We are never too old to learn" is an expression that implies that learning can happen at any age, even now as I have turned 80. Banding books cuts off the oxygen to the flames of life, the mind, the body, and the soul.
https://www.read.gov/aesop/013.html