Time To Change

 https://rpentelbury.blogspot.com/2025/04/time-to-change.html

Time To Change

April 30, 2025

At last, there are words. In the beginning, so it was too. Until then, all was an abstraction of energy not yet given any form, by man. And as our ‘sense of life’ developed, (to quote, in this April month, my beloved brother,) we began verbal constructs that not only turned sound into malleable meanings in our various languages, but that then became inviolate mental concepts that history has proven we are prepared to die for. Yet a house has very many shapes, dimensions, and locations, even though we understand it epistemologically to mean a place of shelter. So it goes. To formulate a paragraph of coherent meaning, let alone a series of phrases or sentences that inspire, is as much dependent on the muse of ancient and atavistic invigoration, as it is on the immediacy of the moment. Pausing to think, overlong, is to lose one’s energy on the train track of thoughts, despite such a break sometimes being but a period of gestation. Since the political slogan is ‘time for a change,’ what does that phrase really mean to you?

The difficulty of pretentious phrases is that it requires commensurate knowledge to participate in their comprehension, (much like the esoterica of knowing that Black Beauty is about a horse.) And if deprived from that cultural enlightenment as a child, so too may one not anymore know who Arthur the Great was, or what Hornby Dunblo means. Each of us is captured by the Petri dish of acculturation into which we are born. Some climb the lip and depart for yet some other grouping, but the predominances of life is what these words are about. One observes that we are persons each struggling much to maintain and persevere with our habitual norms. Yet all around, the world is yet again embroiled in the threats of great, ineluctable, change.

Political divisiveness slices into the fabric of our societies. We are hard put not to view the distinctions between Them, versus Us. And we are cautious in our interactions with friends and family to check into their proclivities, lest we tread on their firmly held beliefs, values, and constructs. The binary division becomes apparent. And the constructs of terminology, thought patterns, belief systems, and values can trounce ethics, morals, integrity, and temperaments, depending on whom one addresses. Yet even better, listening proves the most valuable. One’s vote is one’s own, and gathering whatever one can from others helps much to make one’s mind up, as uncertain, ultimately, as one may feel about the outcome. It is easier to stay in one’s lane, independent of who is at the forefront, and to vote as one’s habits have been, all one’s life. (As such the days may not, in deeds, become ‘sunny’.) Now there’s a Canadian yoking of constructs, paradigms, esoteric knowledge, and history, in a single phrase. Sonny?

Thing is, these words are not meant to persuade you. Nor are they meant to define the only way forward. They are but a nudge toward a more mindful meta-cognition, more intensity of action, more clarity of purpose, and more compassion for the whole. Without one recognizing that we all are struggling toward enlightenment, spiritual evolution, and even geopolitical peace and inclusion, at whatever level of application to task any of us may be observed, evaluated, or professed to be operating within, one is impoverishing oneself of hope, of empowerment, of influence, and of contribution toward the health of the whole. Yes, it is natural for some to be self serving and selfish, but now is the time for genuinely including, accepting, assimilating, and integrating the variables among all of one’s neighbours. By country. By nationality. By religion. By political affiliation. And by a universal sensibility toward The Whole. Still…

“I can do that, but what about them? They cannot! And if they charge at me, I’ve little choice but to retaliate in equal measure.” Yes. And the wars continue. And the political systems perpetuate divides. And the religions perpetuate hierarchies. And thinking, itself, wrestles and wrangles with the spirit, such that one is weary of it all, and sad, and at a loss for words, and fearful of getting this wrong.

So, we go with the flow. Or does one? Do we wait for change to be mandated from without, or are we each given to change, from within? Time, we gather, for each and every one of us, is finite. Truly, is change?

Foolhardy Fellowships

 

Presumptions can be foolish. The coach pointed at me. “You should all run like him. Do that again in slow-motion, boyo. Let’s see that perfect style of yours in action.” Well, for about 20 yards or so, I did it, focusing on the precision of ‘my style’. Being only 12 years old, I knew nothing, really, of ‘how to run.’ The sense of it came naturally to me. And as for ‘slow-motion,’ that too, for me, was just a concept. In those early years of the 60’s, going to movies in South Africa, for me, was a most infrequent thing, and I do not recall having ever seen slow-motion. So, on that hot and sweaty Sports Day I tried to present what I thought it might look like. “That’s good enough,” yelled the coach to stop me. “See,” he told the others, “that’s how to run.”

We were in the Pilditch Stadium grounds, just behind the soaring concrete structure, warming up. It was at last the all-schools’ meet, and I’d always made first in my own school’s playground, so sprinting was a delight. And now here, from the start, I’d impressed the coach with my take-offs. After all, with school practices, I’d come up with reacting to the ‘Buh…,” and did not wait for the “...ang!” of the teacher’s yell. Now, with this new teacher taking a special liking to me while warming us up, with each of us from a different school for the 100 yards dash, I thought I’d have the race ‘in the bag.’

And then, soon enough, we were in the big stadium. My first time. It felt very exciting to see all those people there. The grandstands looked full. The huge field had all sorts of simultaneous events going on. Long jump. High jump. Discus-throwing. There were even races like the 220 yards, the 440, and the fifteen-hundred-yard runs. I’d never conceived of them. (But no one, I discerned, sprinted quite like me.) They even had a real gun! Our impoverished school, Burgher Right Primary, had not had such things. Nor had we even had a track on which to practice. We ran on uneven ground. And a stake at either end had demarcated the start and stop of the 100 yards over a lumpy and uneven lawn. Never mind. I’d been the fastest in my school. And now, here at the big event with our warm-ups just done, I’d shown myself the fastest off the white line, and the best in style too. Sure, I was the only one in bare feet, (as I recall it,) but shoes would just weigh me down. So, when at last ready, with about eight or ten of us at the start line, I was determined to show all the people in the stands just how fast I was.

Hubris. Arrogance. Self-righteousness. These were not terms in my ken, back in those days. Nor was the obverse of those debilitating terms, with universal concepts like compassion, empathy, or concomitance. I was a boy, and like most of my fellows, I thought the best way to be a boy was to best others on every occasion. After all, ‘competition’ was designed to prove just who was ‘best’. So was swimming. So was running. So too, even, were exams.

But a strange thought overcame me as I waited for the, “On your marks!” command. What if I slow-motioned my start, and my run too, and showed them all how it’s done? Surely the very force of my energy would control the others, and we all would run in a slow motion too, and…?

Well, I came dead last. I recall the others springing up, with me still at the starter’s line, and then my still, foolishly, determinedly, running in slow-motion, perfectly, all the while intent on drawing the others back to run that way too. But of course, I never caught up.

Somewhere in our makeup is the sense that our behaviours, our connection, our similarities, are only individualized by the shells of our molecular inheritance. ‘All we need is love.’ All we need is each other. All we need is empathy, compassion, integration, and cooperation, so that others similarly, if not simultaneously, may conduct themselves the same way we do. But real life teaches us that birds of a feather do tend to gather, and even they have their pecking order. We generally have a compulsive need to be first, or better than, or at least be a part of, so that we can be secure with who we are, what we do, and even how we think. Yet I’m of a mind that right now, in the eighth decade of my life, with our world on fear-filled tenterhooks, one is best not to expect one’s behaviours to affect all others, other than to keep being the best that one can be.

Feeding Fears

 

We decimate things at our whim. The leaves from the three arbutus trees bothered both of us. He was out there, too frequently, with his broom and long handled dustpan, clearing his cobble-paved driveway, his immaculately swept pathways, his manicured flower beds. On the other hand, once in a long while, I cleared the fallen leaves on my side with my noisy battery-powered blower, and stuffed the fragmented offal into a black bag, ready for the garbage. Both of us were bothered by the fallen leaves, he much more than my little bit. And right from the start, when I first called the property mine, he’d let me know that he ‘feared that those trees would have to come down, someday’. After all, with that smaller one on my property line, and the two larger ones within his, they obscured my view, but not his.

Birds frequented them. Spring-time Robins. Summer-time Northern flickers. Winter-time Chickadees. Autumn Sparrows. And even resting hummingbirds. But the live leaves, bristling and waving, sometimes hid the birds’ flittings from us. Then too, the wide-spread branches reached up into the sky, a good fifteen feet high, and their rake did impede our ocean view. We’d see so much more of The Strait were they to come down. But I was most reluctant. Trees scrub the sky clean. Trees give life. Trees take decades to grow. Trees take precedence over our own preferences, surely?

But that neighbour also had a magnificent and deeply green and very tall Deodara tree. At some fifty feet in height, and at least twelve feet wide, it not only blocked some of our own vista, but also dropped its messy pine needles atop his other neighbor’s glass-top greenhouse. “For years now,” he uttered, uncertainly, “I’ve been meaning to cut down this tree, much as I don’t want to.”

Thing is, for most of us, excising the detritus of our lives, let alone the obvious, is a difficult thing to do. All over the yards through our very human existence there are the discards and rotten boats and rusted trucks and the heaps of rubbish that clutter our lives. There is the obvious. There is the dubious. There is the valuable, (which may not be useful.) And then there’s junk.

So too for our fears. We indeed have fear for a reason. It serves us. It can ensure that we are safe. But then too, our whole lives become conditioned to fear; fear that we are insufficient; fear that we do not measure up; fear that we do not have the latest; do not have the best; do not have what he or she has; and we can fear that we are not as worthy as any other. We do not wish to be called ‘cheap’. And so, commercialism feeds on our fears. So too do our politicians. So too do even our friends and families and neighbours. One ‘needs’ to ‘measure up’.

And so, we can hack away at the tall poppies within us. We can topple the evolving trees that may grow up from inside us, and we can scare away the birds of our thoughts that may choose otherwise to roost. We take on the constructs of others before us; we can adopt their religions; we often adopt their political stripes; we do sing beside their flags; and we follow the queues that would lead us to the troughs of acceptability, lest, like an escaped prisoner hurrying away from the ubiquitous wall, the spotlight falls on us, and we are arrested, recaptured, or shot.

Those trees on our property lines came down. All four of them. The sky grew bigger. But did our worldview? Did we really contribute to the health of the whole? Did we really gain in our yard’s value so that some future person may benefit, let alone ourselves? And do the birds now merely find some other resting place; just as does one’s own thoughts, when there simply is too much of the mind’s fluttering of fallen leaves with which to contend?

The trees were mulched. All four of them. Like letters of the alphabet in scrabble, their sense was reduced to nothing. And the snarl of chainsaws and growling augers eventually left too. So too did the birds. (But at least that awful volume of leaves shall no more be a bother, eh?)

Of Ethics and Integrity

 

Death unearths us. It can rip us untimely, roots and all, from the cracks and crevasses and detritus and dirt of our soils. The fertilizer that sustained us can get analyzed, evaluated, quantified. And others come to pick over our stuff, our mementoes, our photographs, our letters, our videos, and even the very essence of who we were. The eulogy most frequently becomes a bloated dispensation of our history. It balloons around our good life; it may chuckle at the bad. And being fully human, yet dead, we lie in ice-cold states of awaiting the glance, the touch, and even the kiss of others. Our soul, that ephemeral quality that actually finds no physical lodge within us, is no longer visibly available, despite the speculations of any of the religions and philosophies to which we may have adhered. Time takes each of us, in turn.

Indeed, life makes for rattling one’s sabre. To be ‘fully human,’ as Morrie puts it, is the key. As Goethe put it: “You can tell the metal of a person by what gets their goat.” The differential between character, and personality, though, might be reviewed. As Dylan sings it, one is, “toiling in the danger, and in the morals of despair.” Character, then, becomes a matter of ethical choices, along with experience. Personality, like Elizabethan humours, appears more innate, more predicated on Zodiac signs, more congenital, and can even be more mercurial than character. Character is a rock upon which one’s house of conduct is erected; personality is the collection of accoutrements along the way, the which are largely determined by nature, and affected a little by nurture. Character, time and again, gives rise to actions based on consciousness, consideration, compassion, courage, and clear-headedness. It is the heart (to keep things simple) that governs emotions, fickle emotions, that are reactionary to the endemic sensibility of being sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic in the first place. But with character, there is a marriage between heart and head that defines response, purpose, intent, and action. And so, integrity grows by one’s age, as does one’s ethical stances too. But personality, that colourful manque that clothes one to the grave, can wear different cloaks to hide its unfulfilled representations through the ages. At death, though, one can indeed become rendered unconcealed, utterly revealed.

Encountering ethical challenges along the way is a test of living. Does one effectively change the choices of responses in our passage, or do we repeat our age-old habituations?  Are we really, truly, conscious, as much as is possible of the best choice for all parties involved. Intentionality becomes paramount. And awareness that others may not be able, or mature enough, or innately integrative enough, or wanting enough to adjust and to handle the truth becomes a great matter of sensitivity to the delicacy of each situation. Skill and care are part of character. Deception and deceit can be part of character too. And personality can conceal all, either way. A charming person can have great character, or might also be self-serving. Good character, essentially, comes wrapped in ethics. Personality is wrapped in presentation. And one adjudges each in one’s turn.

So then to come across the detritus of another’s lifetime, and to pick up this or that, with the fingerprints of the dead still very much on it, and to discard, dismiss, or disown the thing out of disassociation seems so sad in the face of another’s lifetime of collecting, of treasuring, of storing. But we all do it. We do it in Antique Shops, and in the wake of love. Sentimentality and pragmatism vie for possessions. The existentialism of our makeup determines that which we in our turn take to the grave. Yet let us learn integrity, ethics, and actions beyond the mere impulses of our personality. At our own death, untimely as it may be, we’d rather not find ourselves by others become embarrassingly unearthed.

Untimely Unearthed

 

Death unearths us. It can rip us untimely, roots and all, from the cracks and crevasses and detritus and dirt of our soils. The fertilizer that sustained us can get analyzed, evaluated, quantified. And others come to pick over our stuff, our mementoes, our photographs, our letters, our videos, and even the very essence of who we were. The eulogy most frequently becomes a bloated dispensation of our history. It balloons around our good life; it may chuckle at the bad. And being fully human, yet dead, we lie in ice-cold states of awaiting the glance, the touch, and even the kiss of others. Our soul, that ephemeral quality that actually finds no physical entity within us, is no longer visibly available, despite the speculations of any of the religions and philosophies to which we may have adhered. Time takes each of us, in turn.

Indeed, life makes for rattling one’s sabre. To be ‘fully human,’ as Morrie puts it, is the key. As Goethe put it: “You can tell the metal of a person by what gets their goat.” The differential between character, and personality, though, might be reviewed. As Dylan sings it, one is, “toiling in the danger, and in the morals of despair.” Character, then, becomes a matter of ethical choices, along with experience. Personality, like Elizabethan humours, appears more innate, more predicated on Zodiac signs, more congenital, and can even be more mercurial than character. Character is a rock upon which one’s house of conduct is erected; personality is the collection of accoutrements along the way, the which are largely determined by nature, and affected a little by nurture. Character, time and again, gives rise to actions based on consciousness, consideration, compassion, courage, and clear-headedness. It is the heart (to keep things simple) that governs emotions, fickle emotions, that are reactionary to the endemic sensibility of being sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic in the first place. But with character, there is a marriage between heart and head that defines response, purpose, intent, and action. And so, integrity grows by one’s age, as does one’s ethical stances too. But personality, that colourful manque that clothes one to the grave, can wear different cloaks to hide its unfulfilled representations through our own ages. At death, though, one can indeed become rendered unconcealed, utterly revealed.

Encountering ethical challenges along the way is a test of living. Does one effectively change the choices of responses in our passage, or do we repeat our age-old habituations?  Are we really, truly, conscious, as much as is possible of the best choice for all parties involved? Intentionality becomes paramount. And awareness that others may not be able, or mature enough, or innately integrative enough, or wanting enough to adjust and to handle the truth becomes a great matter of sensitivity to the delicacy of each situation. Skill and care are part of character. Deception and deceit can be part of character too. And personality can conceal all, either way. A charming person can have great character; or might also be self-serving. Good character, essentially, comes wrapped in ethics. Personality is wrapped in presentation. And one adjudges each in one’s turn.

So then to come across the detritus of another’s lifetime, and to pick up this or that, with the fingerprints of the dead still very much on it, and to discard, dismiss, or disown the thing out of disassociation seems so sad in the face of another’s lifetime of collecting, of treasuring, of storing. But we all do it. We do it in Antique Shops, and in the wake of love. Sentimentality and pragmatism vie for possessions. The existentialism of our makeup determines that which we in our turn take to the grave. So then let us learn integrity, ethics, and actions beyond the mere impulses of our personality. And surely, at our own death, untimely as it may be, we’d rather not find ourselves by others become unnecessarily and embarrassingly unearthed.

Ekphrastic Expositions

 

Ekphrasis? One explains things from one’s own point of view. We expound with emotion, with insight, with knowledge, and even with a pleasurable amount of guesswork. So too do we live in the canvas of our lives. So too do we build upon our perceptions. And the original work, the poem, the painting, the photograph that we expound upon, given the creative springboard that gives rise to our own voice, is as ancient an ekphrastic exposition of our minds as would be a gift from a Greek muse.

Ekphrasis? It’s the big words that can be off-putting. The very chiaroscuro of our elucidations can be too much of a juxtaposition, and without a ready mental formula to deduce what is being read, or heard, the brain gives up. The ears tune out. We get bored. Why not just be simple? Collectively, we feel little responsibility toward assimilating every new concept. It is the rare individual, here and there, who wishes to ‘know everything.’ There simply is too much. Yet inherent to the ‘dumbing down’ of society, as we eschew big words for little ones, and as we hook into Hemingwayesque pithy pronouncements, such as those anchored in the sea of an Old Man, over a predilection for Victorianesque prolific phrasing, such as those surrurating amongst the shifting sands of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is that the vitality and richness of a living language stalls. Keep it simple. Do not ask me to look up a word. Make your references clear. Do not ask me to look up a Title. Make your references obvious. Do not ask me to read for too long, listen for too long, watch for too long, sit for too long, converse for too long, or think for too long; I just want to scroll at my phone. Its screen does not challenge me to stick to something, unless it interests me. I can flick through stuff. I can text without worry about correct grammar. My auto type will correct spellings, most Lee. So what if it makes miss steaks.

The argument for clear articulation is a double-edged sword. Ekphrasis, at best, explores one’s thinking under the Damoclean concept of evolving spiritually, responsibly. But in conspiring freely, our self-awareness by contrast becomes a consummate concentration, enslaving us to self-centricity, egoism, and independent connection. Huh? Yes, we can connect with others across the globe, but at large we get to say what we want, independently, even irresponsibly, and indubitably self-serving. Our every action, however, impinges on all, not just around us.

Chiaroscuro? Day and night have their smudging hours. The middle ground of left and right is where action yields to compromise, to complicity, to compassion. Integration, by degrees, becomes a fuller acceptance. How to accommodate that our own throne of responsibility, which is the human condition, is to be under that sword of Damocles, where every thought, and action, can be questioned, usurped, overturned? Very few things in our world are absolutely and totally and inalterably ‘right’. We are, as a species, too easily fragmented, dissociative, warmongering, and contentious to be lumped into a wholesome group, such as those with the collective brain of termites, or bees, or butterflies. Our metamorphosis is generally individualized, and random, and even a choice, or not. Yet still, mankind evolves more by accident than by design, however much an individual’s chosen cultural group, or not, may control our thinking. At issue is the meaning behind ‘mankind’s evolving.’ Unless we are entirely given to all of us simultaneously becoming loving and compassionate towards each other, as a species, we remain primitive, collectively speaking. And therein lies the rub; integration, fully, would have one accept ‘all’.

Ekphrasis, then, is a Greek word meaning, ‘exploring with a detailed description’. But it is not about the selfies we take with our cell phones, or where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and what’s on our plate. It is rather about the degree of our sensibility of our responsibility toward The Whole. It is not about moralizing and controlling; it is about understanding. It is, after all, about one for all, and all for one.

Graduated Grades Theory

 

Hereby initiated, coined, theorized, full integration is not easy. There is no ultimate graduation. Individualized and abstract, the variegated shafts of the Grade Theory curriculum are neither predetermined, nor predestined. Attainments within any given Grade Level, and even from one Grade to another, are perhaps gradual, or perhaps in paradigmatic leaps. As such, insights and apprehensions are exciting, or subtle, or blends of both. And one may graduate from Grade Two to Grade Five, predominantly, or regress back down a single shaft to Grade One, at any age, or at any stage of one’s progress.

Put simply, a lifetime is seen in terms of passing through natural grades of maturation and comprehension, where predominant behavioral traits sustain one at any given Grade Level, while one may have perceptions and insights pertaining to all grade levels simultaneously. We may well attain levels of expertise in our differentiated curriculums, beyond our age group, that are observable, yet we can evidently still be out of our depth in foreign, unfamiliar, or challenging fields. Some will find such challenges invigorating. Others will baulk and retreat to their own comfort zones. Idiomatic, particularized, and empowering, we prefer the stance from which we may hold court, intellectually, spiritually, morally, physically, emotionally, and even politically.

Integration is not easily attained. Each model of mankind, however simplistic or complex, is perceived as a progress through levels of comprehension and attainment that determine one’s predominant proclivities, or behaviours. From Adler; within Graves; through Maslow; to Jung; we apprehend their integrative contentions, perhaps with sincere interest, but easily may forget the particulars of their curriculum, suggestions, or esoteric challenges. We generally are on our own pathway. Sometimes, we adhere to the group. Sometimes, we stick to our own beliefs. Sometimes we agree, disagree, vote, disavow, and absorb. Yet all along the months and years of one’s life, integration keeps challenging our humanity with its endlessness of more and more.

Being human, evidently, is a complex state. One is assailed by variability. Choices determine pathways, constraints, attainments, and patterns of behaviour. And behavioral patterns in turn become one’s predominant proclivities. Grade Theory is not about a naturally chronological maturation; it is about one’s endemic comprehension, absorption, integration, perception, and apprehension of the largely individualized curriculum inherent to one’s awareness. We take on the habits and customs of our forefathers, our tribe, our family, our friends, our school, our church, our political affiliations, our country’s cares, and our national identity. We can become racist, xenophobic, polarizing, and entrenched. Indeed, integration, full integration, absolute compassion, complete love, and utter understanding is not easily attained. Rather, we have glimpses and insights and momentary practices of them. We are, necessarily, self-protective, lest we find ourselves entirely dissipating into the morass of mankind, devoid of our own ego, smudged beyond our own boundaries, bereft of the curriculum vitae of our individual identity.

There are adults still in Grade Seven who realize Ph.D. aspects in themselves. There are post-doctorates who still need to perfect some Grade Three concepts. Being ontological does not make one epistemological. Meaning making is not always rational. To accept that each of us is highly differentiated in potential, yet sometimes may ‘naturally’ be graded and grouped, can be bristling to some. Yet to absorb, accept, include, and love everything and everybody, now there’s the rub. The Grade Theory, in conception, is hereby intended to help. Integration, after all, is all.