Guinea pig: 1. A short-eared, tailless rodent often used in scientific experiments or kept as a pet. 2. The subject of any sort of experiment.
You know, you’re a sort of guinea pig yourself. Don’t be offended. It’s not a put-down. I am, too. Everybody is.
Isn’t every child born a kind of subject of an experiment? The experimenters—the mother and the father—are not well-trained professionals with extensive schooling and training in the fine art of having and raising children.
The experimenters range from historically, socially, educationally, culturally similar people to widely diverse.
This means that the newborn child often may be similar to his/her extended family members and easily welcomed. On the other hand, the newborn child sometimes may bear little resemblance to most of his/her extended family members and perhaps be hesitatingly welcomed.
In every case, every child born is unique and a blend, a combination of many diverse genes, cultures, and personal traits. Every newborn child is a kind of subject of an experiment on the part of his/her parents.
First of all, every newborn child is part woman (mother) and part man (father). Also, every newborn child learns what it means to grow up not only from these two diverse parents but also from diverse others in his/her immediate and extended family as well as friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and still others—who may be somewhat similar or widely diverse.
In view of the inexperience of parents, the diversity of positive and negative influences, and the vicissitudes of early life, it’s amazing that each one of us survived, not to mention flourished.
(Of course, thanks be to God, our birth and development did involve God, too!)
If your parents were very different from one another and others in your neighborhood as well, you probably grew up being comfortable and at home with a high degree of diversity—and vice-versa!
The experiencing of diversity and the challenges of understanding are not confined to childhood alone. They usually continue all through our lives.
Thanks be to God for the diversity of our contemporary world and the different languages, traditions, cultural mores, and people that are part of our daily life!
We all were used to diversity all the time in our early life. Whatever happened to us that we often seem to have lost our ability to live with and accommodate ourselves to it?
Remember, we’re all “guinea kids”. We’re all subjects of a great and never-ending experiment. We’re all different from one another to one degree or another.
We’re all special and unique with special and unique talents and gifts, special and unique capacities and abilities, and special and unique roles to play in life.
What’s really dumb, wasteful, and deadly is for us to seek to avoid diversity, change, and challenge and to cling to what was instead of dealing with what is and what’s next.
Each one of us is an experimental model, each one of us is constantly changing, each one of us lives by observing, studying, and experimenting.
If a guinea pig were asked, “Aren’t you tired of being tested and experimented with? Don’t you want to be left in peace?”
The pig might well reply, “Are you crazy? You want me dead? That’s who I am and what I do! My nature is to be experimental.”
Yours and mine, too!
17 July 2022