Against the Grain

Due to a quirk of constitution, I find it utterly unable to follow a popular trend.  Though I am guilty of being a fan of Michael Jackson when I was 15 (I didn't have much exposure to alternate music then), since then my life has generally been against the tide.  Perhaps it is a fake sense of superiority, but perhaps, as the joke goes, I am actually superior.

I harbor a long-standing revulsion against going to an overpriced Broadway play, watching an overacted Shahrukh Khan blockbuster, buying an overhyped Apple device, purchasing a luxury vehicle because it can go from zero to 60mph in 5 seconds instead of in 7 seconds, and so on.  Perhaps it is parsimony, perhaps it is an unwillingness to be a dupe, perhaps it is the assertion of an identity that is somewhat misanthropic...

There are costs to blazing one's own trail.  Sometimes one gets lost, and often one realizes that there was no need to go anywhere in the first place, that the need itself (rather than the wrong fulfillment of it) was a mistake, and occasionally one finds that the well-trodden path is actually an instance of the "wisdom of the crowds".  

But the constitution is a hard thing to amend, and so even when it would be much less effort to just watch Netflix and chill, I find it fruitful and uniquely pleasurable to go for a walk instead.

I find this trait in me as far back as I remember, even when I was a six or seven year old boy, and it can perhaps be called the protection of one's soul in a den of thieves.  Or perhaps one is just an old-fashioned malcontent.

But after fifty years of living, I can say that the rewards, intangible as they might be, have been worth it.  As a measure of my fondness for this quality despite its costs, I hope my son inherits this quirk, and in his later years, as I do, tells tales of his adventures and mishaps, and is a lion true to his name, and not a sheep.