“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there
are consequences.”
~Robert Green Ingersoll
Consequences is such an interesting word. For most, it is a word that carries
some very heavy emotional baggage.
Consequences are negative-sounding; they're almost always bad. I can remember my grandmother telling
me as a little girl that if I did not listen there would be consequences. Even at the age of four, I knew that
those consequences would not involve cookies. No, consequences were no good. This lesson was similarly ingrained at school. If you talked out of turn, if you
didn't listen to the teacher, if you said a naughty word, your name was put on
a rung of the “Consequences Ladder.”
The lower on the ladder your name moved, the less likely it was that
you'd get to enjoy recess.
Consequences meant no kickball.
In high school health class, they began talking about a whole new set of
consequences. If you had
unprotected sex, for example, there would be consequences that would be even
more difficult to deal with than trying to keep an egg from cracking as you
kept it with you for every waking hour of your spring vacation. Yep, eggs were like babies, and if you
had unprotected sex, your consequences would be of the squalling rather than
the scrambled variety. However, as
an adult, I came to learn that consequences was a more neutral kind of word;
consequences could be good or bad; consequences could be predictable (like when
I got my first tattoo) or unpredictable (the result of a monarch butterfly
flapping its wings in the Amazon and me getting in a car accident) or even
happy (like getting on eHarmony and meeting my husband and the love of my
life). Anyway, I suppose Ingersoll
has it right. I don't suppose
nature can reward or punish us, unlike grandmothers or school officials; it
just is. But, like with global
warming or climate change, too much hairspray can cause a natural disaster.
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