The Path Through the Woods

When I was seven, my father cut a path through the woods for me to take to the place where the school bus would pick me up. The south grows thickets as well as the Amazon, but he had a scythe and he whacked through the jungle to the road where I would wait for the bus. He asked me if I knew what to do. I did not, but I told him I did. I had never been on a school bus. It was terrifying at first. After a while it was kind of fun. After a while longer it was boring.

That was the beginning of my life as I think of it, of my independence from my parents, of me learning to be me. I was on my own. I never stopped to wonder why the path didn’t grow wild again. My father must have kept it cut for me, but he never told me he did. He and my mother saved money to send me to college, but they never told me they did that either. That was another path they cut for me, one I thought I travelled on my own when in fact they might as well have been right there with me, holding my hand the way my mother had when I caught that first school bus.

My life is an accident of birth. I’d like to say I owe my success to my hard work and ambition, but I believe I owe it more to those paths my parents made for me. So what does that mean for those of us born to plenty? What obligation does that accident of birth impose upon us? Or does it create any obligation at all?

Over the long sweep of history, some prosper, but most do not. And those who prosper have the aid of not only their fortunate circumstances but also of the labors of their less privileged neighbors, the laborers who till the fields and man the assembly lines, the workers who create wealth but do not share in it themselves.

Luck does not compel generosity, but neither does it warrant smugness. At the moment of birth, none of us has done anything to set ourselves apart from children born in the slums. And yet we learn to accept that our privilege derives from our character rather than our good luck. When we give a beggar food at the back door or drop a few coins in the Salvation Army kettle, we feel we are acting from the goodness of our hearts, perhaps even from a sense of noblesse oblige.

But what if we thought we must return the favor that the fates have given us? What if we felt we should be path clearers ourselves, and not just for our children, but for the children of others. What if we truly believed that “there but for fortune (or the grace of god, if you wish) go I”? Would it make us feel lucky? Certainly. Would it make us feel obligated? I'm not so sure.

I don’t suspect many of us feel that being lucky at the craps tables in Las Vegas carries with it an obligation to use some of the money to help others. Maybe that’s all there is to it. If we are lucky, we feel lucky, not indebted. So if we hit the jackpot, we may put a little extra in the charity envelope and feel happy with ourselves for our unbidden generosity. Maybe nature has set it up that way for us. If you get lucky and come upon a fresh kill, drag it off and hide it for yourself and your children: that is the way to survive.

If that’s the case, be glad if you were born lucky. And try to not think too much about those who weren’t. It will just make you feel bad. This is the paradox of our humanity. To earn our place as moral individuals, we often must do things that our atavistic brains resist. We have to see through the rationalizations for our selfishness that our pre-frontal cortex has laid in to justify the primitive programming of our base brain.