Within every group, we repeatedly find at least one person who is not happy with the majority of belief-based practices the group purports to perpetuate.

“It is well with my soul.”

“Be still my soul.”

The previous two sentences may or may not be familiar to you.

I can quickly associate them with song titles and melodies.

For every one of us, familiarity is comforting yet can breed contempt.

Inconsistency disrupts the smooth mood of happy contentedness.

We, as sets of states of energy, have paths we follow to reinforce our selves, our sense of being.

The paths may be well-rutted or invisible.

We may walk in line with others or trailblaze the path ourselves.

Our contempt may drive us from one subculture and into the waiting arms of Sirens in a different subculture.

Our comfortable life in one subculture may deafen us to the other subculture’s Sirens, instead.

As a parent, do you want your children to have a comfortable life or have to fight tooth-and-nail for a life they’ve build on their own?

Do you want your subculture to provide easy-to-follow character/trait-building exercises?

Do you want your children to form a new subculture from scratch?

We are all children, gifts to the world from parents who may or may not have wanted us in the first place.

Regardless of the intention of our conception, we are here.

Our subcultures may be just what we want or don’t exactly fit us comfortably.

Subcultures often have to work out which members are the best fit and create exit strategies for those who will never fit.

Sometimes, like religious systems and youth-training programs, there is confusion at the top of the subcultural ranks about how to protect the image of the subculture while figuring out how to remove ill-fitting members quietly, which takes a lot longer than admitting the fit was never right and publicly excommunicating the members immediately.

We like it when people like us, even if they aren’t like us.

We feel complimented when someone wants to join our subculture, no matter how much we know our Sirens are blaring subliminally/overtly attractive messages of invitation.

Thus, when the ill-fitting members become poisonous to the health of the subculture, we hesitate.

Do we admit our vanity got in the way of our sanity?

After all, didn’t we convert that person to our way of life?  What if we just try a little harder, maybe we’ll completely correct the bad behaviour of that person and heal the subculture at the same time?

Surely we’re not capable of making mistakes in judging people who want to be just like us, because we love our subculture wholeheartedly, with undying love and devotion?

When the subculture has exorcised its demons, reluctantly admitting its mistakes in hiding its problem people before finally removing them, can those who left the subculture because of contempt ever find it in their thoughts to forgive the subculture and return to the comfort of familiarity they once enjoyed?

Can I?

Can I admit I have horribilised the tiny human errors of my subculture and return to it in my middle years?

What if I’m simply following the wellworn path of people my age who, slightly dissatisfied with the closed-in feeling of any one subculture, in this case my parents’, explored the world, sought out something, anything, that gave me a feeling of escape for a while, only to discover that the subculture that my parents shared with me wasn’t bad after all, that every subculture has its faults, its members who are ill-fitting and don’t belong who made me uncomfortable and were eventually pushed out, giving us room and safety to return, no longer fearing that the worst of us still lurks in the dark corners?

I don’t need to prop the world on my shoulders.

I tell the world that I’m happy if we all enjoy ourselves, celebrate who we are and where we came from, no matter how much our parents did or did not want us, embracing a subculture (or mix of subcultures) in which we feel most comfortable, even if we don’t like all of it.

Sometimes, I forget that I don’t have to like everyone.  I don’t have to compromise my beliefs to validate yours which directly conflicts with mine.  We can agree to disagree and go on our way, positively acting to promote our subculture rather than negatively talking about denigrating someone else’s.

“Be Thou My Vision,” for instance.