The Illusory Burden of Inheritance.

It occurs to me that we are, each one of us, the end result of countless episodes of frantic, and occasionally not-so-frantic, coupling over tens of thousands of years. (Hard to visualize any sort of coupling involving the couple pictured above, I'll admit.)

But who would have thought that a bit of random how's-your-father could eventually result in the motley crew of not very useful, somewhat confused, mostly unattractive individuals who presently occupy the Government benches in Canberra?

You can only come to the conclusion that, random selection being what it is, it would take dedicated and purposeful line-breeding to achieve such a consistent and spectacularly appalling outcome. There must be a Tory stud farm.

                                                                      

One could, perhaps, formulate an argument that each of us represents the end result, if not the purpose, of the individual existences of countless ancestors, for whom we may embody the only logic for their being. 

Each one of us implicitly would not only carry the DNA, but the hopes and dreams of all those ancestors. All their days of joy, pain, endeavour, triumph, defeat could only be justified and given meaning by our existence.

However if this were the case, their cumulative hopes, expectations and ambitions would be overwhelming, for without us, their existence would have no ultimate purpose.

The knowledge gained during each lifetime, but extravagantly lost at its completion, is not gifted to us. The hope that we, as their descendants, would fulfil the infinite potential that we all must have, we invariably fail to achieve.

But we are doing the best we can, as they did. We, too, must leave the task to our descendants. 

The universal message that we should all receive from our forebears, and I am sure the message they would want us to receive is not "Don't fuck up" but "Don't be too hard on yourself".

So keep calm and carry on.

You have their blessing.