Winterborn

[Blighter]

[font=Palatino Linotype][color=#999999]W[color=#99AA99]e choose to follow rules.

Whether they are written down in a book going by the title of "Laws of Whatever" or whether they only exist deep in the back of our heads as unwritten and unspoken thoughts, we choose to follow rules. It doesn't matter what rules they are, like say the Laws of the Republic of Liberty, or whether they are just the moral guidelines you live by, they are rules you choose to follow all the same. You choose to follow some of them consciously and some subconsciously without ever really noticing.

When I was a young child with a working memory, what little knowledge I had acquired in the few years of my life and the most basic abilities to question and to reason, I once got really angry at a friend of mine. He was my neighbor and we had been building sandcastles and playing together as we grew up - our parents all got along well together. Then one day he took my favorite toy, a little doll I had been given my grandmother on my fourth birthday, and he accidentally let it fall into the wet sand on a rainy day.

Instead of crying, which as I much later found out my parents would've expected to happen, I got angry and I hit him on the shoulder, because it was my favorite toy and he had carelessly let it fall and get dirty. I remember that I must've hit him pretty hard, because he fell over backwards into the sandbox and started crying.

Next moment my parents and his parents rushed over to us - they had been watching us play while talking about things which I didn't understand and don't even remember - and then his parents helped him up and my parents scolded me.

They told me that you didn't hit others, you didn't hurt others.
I remember asking "Why?", but the only answer I got was "Because it's bad and you just don't!" - I later said something along the lines of "But he dropped my doll!" and got a slap on my behind from my mother. I too remember that I spent the next hour crying. It would only be several years later that I would remember those events and actually ask the question "Why?" again, but that time I would ask myself.

Nowadays when I look back at that day and ask myself the question the answer comes easy. Because it's stupid. It's stupid to hit someone out of impulse, and it's unreasonable to it because he dropped a little doll into wet sand and it got dirty, a doll that a day later would be clean and pristine again because it would've had been put into the washing machine. It's a reaction not matching the proportions of the action that caused it.

As a child I didn't know better of course. All I knew was what my mother had told me. It was bad and I just didn't do it. Today it's different. And it's like a little rule in my head already, subconscious but it's there. I won't hit someone because they drop something that belongs to me, even if it gets dirty, and even if it breaks. If it were something important and broke, I might get angry, but I wouldn't react to it with physical violence like I did that day.

It's just one of the rules I choose to follow, and would I not have invested thought into it, would it not have been such a significant event of my childhood, I probably would be following it willingly without even consciously knowing that I did. Of course it goes without mention that it all was a learning experience even back when I was a kid. Don't hit others, don't hurt others. It's bad and you will get slapped on your behind if you do.