Can’t Run Away From DNA

 ONCE YOU FACE IT, THEN YOU’LL KNOW IT.

It’s all in the genes.

It all started with a muffin. There were a couple of pizza boxes and brown paper bags stacked on the kitchen counter. Whenever there is a mess like that, even a structured mess, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I grabbed it all and threw it out.

The muffin was in the bottom of one of the bags. My wife wanted that muffin. I bought it for her that morning. It was when she asked about it, that I started thinking about why I had this unthinking reflex to throw away the clutter. I’m like a shark. It’s like a seek and destroy mission.

It dawned on me that something genetically induced the reaction. My father had an infuriating ability to throw away anything he deemed unnecessary that was lying around. That included me. If he caught me lying around, he attempted to throw me.

That’s the thing with genetics.

As much as we swear to ourselves that we won’t be like other members of our family, we end up doing the things we swore we wouldn’t do. Some of us drink too much, even though we watched our parents drink too much. We swore we wouldn’t and then we did.

My grandfather had a problem, well, he had many problems, but one of them was gambling. My mother inherited that from him. She couldn’t inherit anything else. He lost almost everything gambling.

We don’t seem to get all of the bad habits of our relatives. Just the ones that we notice. It’s like it gets embedded in our subconscious. If you hear you had an uncle that had a bad temper, you subconsciously tell yourself that it’s acceptable that you too may have a bad temper.

We’re all looking for clues about how to operate. When we’re growing up, we take in information from watching those around us. Sometimes our DNA is imprinted with traits that are handed down to us. It’s been proven, more or less, that trauma that was suffered by our past generations can manifest in us.

That’s just more stuff we have to deal with. It’s not bad enough that we have our own problems and suffering at the present. Oh no. We also have to deal with stuff that was inflicted on us when we weren’t even around.

Let’s say your people lived in poverty or were persecuted or both.

There are scars that were embedded in the operating system that we use to develop a mental construct to direct on how to perceive this reality that we go through every day. We didn’t ask for it, but that’s how it goes. It takes a lot of effort to recognize that.

But that’s the key. To recognize it and take conscious steps on how to deal with it. Of course, we let our guard down, and the behavior seeps out. We just need to remember that we blew it and take care to not have it come up again.

Life takes a lot of work. Once we get our minds right, it gets somewhat simpler. You’ve got to deny yourself of some bad habit coping mechanisms and that can be a pain in the ass, but it usually works out for the best.

From now on, I have to remember to check the bag to make sure the muffin isn’t in there before I toss the bag out. At least this story came out of it and I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.