There’s a message in it somewhere. During my morning distractions of checking email, visiting my regular news threads, and going through the daily inbox of information, I happened upon Pearl Buck. I know she was a prolific author, but I’ve never read any of her work. The reason she caught my eye today, was because of one her quotes.
“One faces the future with one’s past.”
I believe this to be absolutely true. Of all of us. There is not one situation that we face in life, that is not influence by every, single experience that we’ve encountered before. Everything builds on the next, with us humans.
Every opinion we form, every statement we make, and every choice we whittle out, have all been affected by our past experience.
We think we will like peanut butter cookies. We’ve never had them before, but we have eaten peanut butter on toast, PB&J sandwiches, and we’ve taken peanut butter, by spoon, right out of the jar. Peanut butter is good when it makes its way into the center of a Reese Cup. So we say “yes” to Vivian. “I will have a cookie, thank you, Viv.” And sure enough, we find that we like them.
So it goes with our taste in all other things. People. Religion. Politics. Economics. And on.
But the thing to remember about this, about those cookies. Not all peanut butter cookies are alike. You may find that some are better than others. There are times when they may be completely terrible in fact, as the time when Elmer left the sugar out his recipe. You may buy some at the store, only to find when you’ve opened the box, that they are in a big bunch of crumbles.
Yes. That is how the cookie crumbles. So. We really can’t judge all peanut butter cookies by the very first one we’ve tasted. Or the second, third, or one-hundreth. Each cookie should stand alone.
And Ms. Buck was right. She gave us a pearl of wisdom in that quote.
I learned she was a Missionary in China for a large part of her life. I didn’t know this before. She was there in China, for her first 40 years or so. She seemed highly intelligent from the brief biography I read, and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1932, and 1938, respectively.
Toward the end of her life, it sounds like she sort of fell for a guy, who may have scammed her for most of her money, which was disappointing to read. She died in 1973, at the age of 80. Lung cancer.
During her life, she wrote a gazillion novels, a mountain of non-fiction books, a boat load of short stories, and just twenty children’s books. I bet she had a lot of good quotes in those pages.
And I bet all of it was shaped by things that happened in her past. One way or the other. She may even have had a thing for peanut butter cookies. Most people do.
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“I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.”
― Beatrix Potter
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“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”
― Stephen King
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“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.”
― Alan Keightley
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