Why did I have to end up being a fool magnet? And why are there so many fools? In the New Thought philosophy there is a Law of Attraction which is the belief that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into a person’s life. According to that logic, since I am attracting fools then I have to be fool myself.
I passed the elementary school as an insect. No, I did not go through a metamorphosis and transform into a beetle like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. I was just diligent as an ant and hardworking as a bee. Since I was calm, quiet, introvert, and well-behaved boy, my teacher took the opportunity to change my benchmates all the time. I had too long a fuse, and also the model that burned slowly. A delay fuse. Therefore, I had to share the bench with all the restless, aggressive and lazy classmates, so that I would “influence” them positively.
Apart from delay fuses, there are also very quickly burning fuses, or detonating cords. I learned that when the boy next door, the fat Ivan, snatched a piece of each type of fuse from his old man, who worked as a rock blaster at the open-pit mine in Bor. Ivan made couple of friends hold the black delay fuse with their fingers as he lit it with his lighter. The fuse burned slowly and the sparks were clearly visible. One by one, we let go of the fuse as the embers began to get close to our fingers. Then he gave us the red, detonating cord, just to screw us over. The fuse burned so fast that everyone holding the cord burned their fingers. No doubt, a rock blasters’ joke. That same guy once stole his dad’s entire salary and shared it with his friends. But that is a completely different story. The thing is, those weaker students influenced me as well. So, you try to persuade, to reason, but oftentimes you just shut up and suffer in silence. You smoulder slowly like the delay fuse, until they drive you up the wall. When they eventually do, it’s like someone plants the red fuse, just to mess with you, and boom! You show your teeth and they get off your back for a while.
You can get away with it when you are a brat, but as you grow up you cannot go on with that sort of crap without it being counterproductive. You have to use a different approach for those who get on your nerves. But no matter how much I try to be “zen”, to breathe deeply, to count to ten, see things from a larger perspective, or use humour as a weapon against them, I simply cannot ignore when people behave like fools. My wife says that life sends me fools because it wants to teach me how to deal with them. She’s probably right. In the meantime, until I learn how to handle them, I live by the motto: “When life gives you lemons – make lemonade”. So this is a creative attempt to digest fools and clear them out of my system by writing. Life can send me fools all it wants – then I have more ingredients for my lemonade.
I know, this is nothing personal.
As Jack Nicholson says: “Even oysters have enemies.”
Let’s dance!
/Miller
#foolmagnet