Harburg seemed to hold me on a long iron chain of tradition. I could no longer distinguish between past and present. Panic filled me as I remembered the day I had decided that it no longer mattered if my parents forced me to steal.

I felt like a great tree into which everyone had carved their initials. Every mark left on me as a child had become a wound. Every house I passed as an adult, walking with my friend and Alex, came alive with memories.

My father blamed my mother for our living in a family without honor. Yet he, the lazy academic he was, had contributed nothing to the honor my grandfather had built through genuine hard work. Instead, he considered working-class people, the uneducated proletarians, beneath him. He would not associate with them.

And yet, whenever he ran out of excuses for failing to contribute financially to his own family’s well-being, he conveniently retreated behind the shields of symbolism, religion, and hierarchy.

Every corner I turned reminded me of who I was and where I had come from. Every step seemed to add another load of shame and guilt to my shoulders. I kept telling myself that I was not responsible for my parents’ actions, but knowing that did not make the burden disappear.
I had been only a child.
I was not guilty of what they had forced me to do.

By the age of thirteen, I had already reached a conclusion of my own.

My father, in particular, seemed to invoke religion whenever logic became elusive or threatened to conflict with his demands. When reason no longer served him, belief provided an authority that could not easily be questioned.

I did not yet have the language to understand what I was observing.

That came later. Psychology and neurology eventually provided the foundation I had lacked as a child, offering ways to understand how belief, fear, authority, conditioning, and the human need for certainty can shape both thought and behavior.

I came to see that, for someone seeking answers, reliance on a belief system such as religion—or the pursuit of enlightenment through a deity—can become an escape from reality when evidence is unavailable, dismissed, or deliberately ignored.
In much the same way, karma need not be understood as a supernatural force. It can be understood simply as consequence: what follows from what came before, an unfolding chain of cause and effect through which actions, choices, and circumstances shape what comes next.

Clinging to any unproven belief as unquestionable truth risks trapping the seeker in a cycle of dependency, forever looking outward for certainty, guidance, or meaning instead of developing the ability to question, reason, and understand independently.

For me, the search for truth could not depend on belief alone. It required a willingness to question what I had been taught, to examine assumptions, to endure uncertainty, and to follow the evidence wherever it might lead.