Dispelling Deep Dark Depression

‘They’ say depression can be more a matter of chemistry than it might be in the mind. How truly awful for those so afflicted. Is life really just a matter of ‘what you eat, you are’? We can attempt to think our way into a new threshold, but if the body will not follow, and the mind will not accept, then we can but rail, rail against the loss of the comfort-zone. Despite ‘choice,’ tradition and acculturation envelopes us. Throughout history we’ve bemoaned ‘change.’ Great swaths of time have proved severe, horrid, and entirely unacceptable. In the rear-view mirror it can all be seen as very dreadful, if not in the window upon the future outlook from within our present times too.

We are ‘victims’ of the times. Awful circumstances can envelope us, enfold us. Yet quite often, rewarding times can enrich us too. It’s at the ‘crossing of the threshold’ that we can determine our viewpoints. In the sense of paradigm shifts needing the dissolution, the degeneration, or the fragmentation of the old, before the new paradigm asserts itself, one may find the insecure anxiety of awaiting the certainty of the new, to be disarming, indeed. Like stepping from the jetty onto the rocking boat; like feeling blindly for the unseen rung below one’s foot; like hoping in the dark that one’s stretched-out fingers may click on the light-switch. What does the future foretell?

That’s what happens to Adam, the protagonist of ADMISSION, A Story Born of Africa. Twice, in the dark, he feels for the light switch, the same switch, in the generator-machine shed. The first time, when he is four, it ends in humor. The second time, when he is eleven, it ends in death. But for Adam the ongoing challenges of his life never culminate in depression; he is too determined to keep journeying toward a future that is of his own making. To choose! In his life, each obstacle is something, at the very least, to be outwaited, since he knows down deep that circumstances keep changing, as long as he looks for, or awaits, the time to make his choices.

Helpless, we may not always leap the chasms between what was, and what we foresee; and therein, in that very uncertainty, can lie our debilitating fear. If life were more assured, we may more easily go into the ‘good night’ of old age. Not all of it ought to need to be a raging-rage against the dying of the light. Not every future is dismal. Not every ‘progress’ is detrimental.

Thing is, depression itself can arise out of traumatic experiences. But not necessarily. Post trauma (as we know the syndrome,) is usually the result of some awful experience. But not all depression needs one’s own direct physical experience; our mental apprehension can be quite sufficient. The little girl, seeing and hearing her mummy get bitten by the bee, may register inordinate anxiety over bees the rest of her life. The boy, seeing and hearing his dad panic over the snake in their path, may never overcome such built-in fear. Indeed, some of our problem is that many fears are deeply subconscious. And then again, sometimes we know precisely why we fear, are anxious, or get depressed. Life has taught us ‘a sadness.’ We feel that we cannot change our external circumstances, let alone ourselves. We do, indeed, fear for the future!

Indignities can attend our aging and bone-aching cage. Hurt digs at our heartsore of personal losses. Anger rises at those who do not, will not, cannot alter the seemingly clear and imminent foreclosure on our earth. The dismal outlook for our children; the earth’s bulging and unchecked masses; the shrinking biodiversity; the soiled ocean; the gritty air; and the painfully inherent actuality that we no longer shall be able to protect and contribute and give succor to those we love, closely, much less the populace and the fauna and flora at large, all of it, is a future bleak and uncertain and horrid in the foreseeing. Mindfulness, chemistry, feelings, choices; where does one draw a line? ‘God give me the grace to change what I can, and to accept the things I cannot’?

Then again, if ‘choice’ be the elixir of life, then by breathing, now for now, and feeling grateful for each breath, we may find ourselves a passage of rite; a depression perhaps given light; right? 

Humbled By Humor

“Being able to laugh! That’s the golden secret to life. We take ourselves so seriously,” answered my friend. At 78, he has much wisdom to share. It may not be ‘new’, but it is tempered by the sheer endurance of his own longevity. Overcoming several physical ailments, and the irregularities and vagaries of the vicissitudes of an individual life, as he has, my friend’s words are not delivered lightly; they arise out of the wellspring of a life lived with keen observation.

One’s ability to encounter life’s history with humor is one thing, but to release it during duress is quite another. (Abashed, we do not like to undress.) In my novel (ADMISSION, a Story Born of Africa,) Adam Broadford is not one to guffaw, nor to chuckle. His humor is confined to a smirk, an intellectual enjoyment of predicament, an intentional play on words, and sometimes even, a deliberate obfuscation. The subtlety is in the mind. Although others may laugh at predicaments, Adam cannot easily give his humor reign. He is always analyzing. Word-play is his favored laugh. (A nosey and disliked teacher, named Mevrou Neusindruk, means Mrs. Nose-shove-in, ha!) Yet, as in Adam’s story, not all word tapestries are woven with the same thread. Although flecks of silvered humor in his writing may appear, here and there, it is a more resilient material, overall, that sews up the course of his progress. His is the sensibility of perpetually thinking about his thinking. If reaction is at the point of having a funny-bone, response is the approbation of events. The approval. We laugh at he who slips on the banana peel (especially if others laugh too). We grow concerned if, having once slipped ourselves, we’ve cracked our tail-bone.

Like using our hands, there are perhaps six deployments to humor. Most obviously, the lewd, crude, and vulgar may be represented by the thumb. Thickest of our digits; it often is the most useful. Second is the index finger, that which pokes fun at others. Third is the middle finger, that which is suggestive, explicit. Fourth is the implicit, the ring finger, circumscribed humor, not readily recognized, until evidently deployed; (my friend, reading this now, may chuckle at this recalling of his bizarre image of decapitating pigeons; another reader may well shudder.)  The fifth, the pinky, is humor that entails wisdom, insight, care, compassion. Rare. And the sixth? In the unique lines and craters of our palms, time worn and grooved into our individual psyches, lie the experiences of our personal lives; a smile; a wink; a yoke (ha!) Some things, indeed, are funny.

In order to get their laugh, comedians choose those things common to the crowd. A friend, more personally, may choose something esoteric; something we each know. An acquaintance may tell a joke: “You’re the ugliest buffaloes I ever did see,” said the cowboy, and rode on. The one buffalo turned to the others and said, “Was that a discouraging word?” … What? You don’t know the song: “Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play! Where seldom is heard, a discouraging word, and the clouds do not shame us, all day”? So...? Got you singing? (And yes, I do refer to Jungian shadows by way of using ‘clouds’, indeed! Ha!)

Thing is, as one smiles into the eyes of others with our laughter, we become connected, glued, made humble by the sharing, and transported beyond age, race, religion, and division. Or not. Some humor is sadistic. Some humor is too off colour. Some humor is far too dependent on identification with specifics of language, ideology, place. Some humor is esoteric, built up out of intellectual commonality. Some has its foundation in wit, witticisms, and word-play. But that which tickles our collective funny bone quite clearly needs be germane to all; commonality is the precursor to the longevity of a joke. We know that. How else to laugh at the sheriff saying that the cowboy is wanted for rustling! Why? Well, since he wears a paper hat, has a paper gun, and even shoots paper bullets! (Rustling! Ha! Get it?)  …..Oh! (ha! ha!)

In the laugh and the catching of another’s eyes we are humbled by humor. Age, and distinctions of attainment, pedigree, race, religion, and even sex can all disappear in the connection of jokes. It can. But it seldom does. After all, to let go of all inhibition, one needs to undress. Ugh!

Poisoned by The Past

Broken, we can never be whole. The cracks can show. Especially under duress. “Just who do you think you are?” can resonate down the decades. We can poison ourselves with our past. We can so easily be hamstrung, hobbled, hurt.

Overcoming childhood insufficiency can be the worst of it. Little girls are demeaned by boys, by parents, by others. Little boys too. Like atavistic swimmers, all hoping to reach the edge ‘first,’ there is little of compassion for (let alone consciousness of) others. It becomes a learned thing; we are taught not to step on ants. Gratitude to those who teach ‘love,’ gets profound.

It is thinking about our thinking that enlightens us. Victim, or victorious, that which was the past can debilitate, or temper our metal. And although we each are influenced by all those around us, ‘good,’ or ‘bad,’ (according to The Good Book, to steal from Tevye’s performance in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’), in the sum of it all, what one makes of one’s life, along the way, is actually up to oneself. Indeed, one needs think about one’s thinking.  

That’s the rub. We are so easily given to blaming others, or even relying on an ‘Other,’ that such qualities of ‘Self-Reliance,’ and ‘Self-Actualization,’ (let alone ‘Independence,’) are relinquished into the purvey of our acculturation. Thus it is that there can be a perpetual ringing of bell-curves in one’s sensibilities. At each juncture of one’s paradigm shifts (or not,) there is the sense of being an outlier, leaving an old perspective, until absorbed by the ‘kismet’ of others into yet more and more acceptance of what once appeared surreal.

In, ‘ADMISSION, a Story Born of Africa,’ Adam Bradford encounters extraordinary challenges. Given the physical and emotional abuse perpetuated by a family who do not understand his gifted nature; given the page-turning adventures among lethal snakes; a child-snatching crocodile; attacking baboons; a marauding leopard; his having to shoot his beloved pet donkey; and given the racially charged threats, subsequent murders, and the political capitulation of Northern Rhodesia into Zambia (1974); for Adam there is an ‘otherworldly’ quality to his life that (unless in some measure personally experienced by others,) can indeed appear surreal.

His reader, one trusts, can relate to the secrets he is forced to keep. His reader, one trusts, can relate to the necessity to surmount physical pain, emotional difficulty, and inordinate challenge.

But in relating his unusual story, Adam realizes that the sheer gauntlet of challenges can hardly be de-rigueur, for most. Thank goodness. It is his teenage years that become all the more remarkable. His illicit and interracial affair could prove lethal. His countenancing an abusive uncle results in extreme hardships. His gainsaying the church gets him whipped. His escape to a boarding school results in yet more secrets to keep, and when graduated, and a conscript in the South African Army, he needs take control of his future, let alone be a victim of the past.

We turn the page to a New Year. We celebrate the old, learn from the past, and venture into a relative unknown. Some of us are comparatively secure. We have loved ones near enough. We do not necessarily feel geographically displaced. We have positions in society, welfare sufficient to our means, and friends and family, and are relatively fortunate. (Yes, despite it all, there are those in dire distress, near and dear.) Yet we are not necessarily victims of our past, unless ‘pushed’. Oh, certain things can ‘set us off.’ Most usually, they are the things that result from our perceptions during our upbringing. And thinking about our thinking, indeed, can prove not only a necessary thing, an immediate thing, but an enduring thing. Accordingly, adjustments are, consciously, made. After all, each year may indeed be ‘new,’ but so is each moment.

Or do we declare ourselves, ‘always,’ poisoned by our past?

Grace, Gratitude, and Grit

“So, what brings you to this point in time?” my friend asks, today. He is serious. “Well,” I say, a bit self-consciously, “the stepping stones provided by others. After all, you yourself have been so instrumental in my life.” He looks into, and then through me. In his eightieth year, he too has had his stepping-stones. Persons, family, and friends. Like any of us, some have been leaning-posts, some have been walking sticks, and some have ferried us across turbulent waters. For them all, one can give gratitude. For them all, one can give grace. But not all know each other’s grit.

Theresa Eldmann (a post-doctoral fellow in History, at the University of South Africa) in a 2015 essay, ‘The lingering, unspoken pain of white youth who fought for apartheid,’* writes: “White South African society lived in almost complete ignorance about the scale of the war and the SADF’s strategies. Most conscripts said little about what they experienced. This was partly because they had to sign the Official Secrets Act upon joining. It was also the result of the ‘willed ignorance’ of most white South Africans and the draconian censorship laws of the time.”

Yes, Adam Broadford, in my ADMISSION, A Story Born of Africa,** endures a particular set of inordinate ordeals. (Not just while he is in the army.) The history of Africa is replete with terrible circumstances. There continues to be ugly divisions, terrible atrocities, and the disease of warfare. So too for other countries. So too for the individuals from those countries. And unless one can relate, specifically, it can all seem so very otherworldly, so very remote, so very far removed from our everyday realities that we most easily fill up a gas tank, buy a bottle of wine, and go to enjoy yet another Christmas dinner. But, (not now to dampen one’s spirits,) there are people out there, throughout history, who deserve our continuing grace, ongoing gratitude, and even our own perpetual grit in the face of daily life itself, not just on Remembrance Day.

Professor Eldmann, goes on: “Military conscription was key in the apartheid state’s ‘total response’ to what was construed as a ‘total onslaught’ by the perceived threats of communism and African nationalism. … Over the 25 years that conscription was in place, service increased from nine months to a total of 720 days including camps. … when the SADF invaded Angola after its Portuguese colonial government collapsed. This initiated 14 years of what became known as the ‘Border War’, consisting of intense military and guerrilla warfare in northern Namibia and southern Angola.  … There were harsh consequences for those who disobeyed the call-up. Their choices? A court martial and up to six years in prison, exile in another country or going into hiding in South Africa. … Conscientious objection (on religious rather than moral ethical or political grounds) [only] became a legal option in the mid-1980s…. As the more complex dimensions of our apartheid history begin to emerge, the healing and transformative possibilities of stories about conscription surfacing in the public domain should not be underestimated - especially as a way of making sense of our deeply racially divided society.”

So then, what brings you or me, or an Adam Broadford to any given point? Well, all along life’s way we have been supported and guided and steered, (albeit sometimes will-he, nil-he,) by the society into which we’re born. And we’ve reacted, responded, been inspired, and impelled. Now, as our family and friends come to celebrate, on birthdays, on Christmas, on Festive Occasions, or otherwise, can it be with deep gratitude, living grace, and ongoing grit that we look them in the eyes? Might we be glad that we can still share such ‘alive’ time with them, at all? And in our hearts, those we love, do remain, always.

                                                                     Paul Smulders' CD, Missing in Action (paul@asesa.co.za)

*See: https://theconversation.com/the-lingering-unspoken-pain-of-white-youth-who-fought-for-apartheid-46218

**See: https://www.amazon.com/author/richardpentelbury

Family, Friends, Familiars, and Foes

In the smallest inner circle, in a dart-board’s bull’s eye analogy, might we allow those we hold closest. But even among those we keep furthest away, especially on the outskirts, there can live family, friends, familiars, and foes. As differentiated as tabulations can be, within each slice of the dart-board pie, we are not always a victim of an other’s sharp points; some are soft tipped; some acquaintances we can be very fond of; they strike love into our soul; others we may instinctually like; their presence seems feather light. Some hug us, with tenderness. Then too, some sharper persons we ward away. Some may be too dull. Problem is, we are not necessarily the ones in control. Some darts, those of our enemies, can land with a severe thud, difficult to dislodge; their wounds leave scars; their memories arise in disfavour.

Foes, for most of us, are seldom lifelong. Forgiveness, of a sort, happens, especially as the injuries of the past lead from way to way. We forget, overlook, and come to terms with our scars; perhaps more easily those that have been done to us, than those we’ve gone and done to others. Memory thickens. Blood thins. That ‘thicker than water’ feeling of ‘belonging’ to someone else, helps, especially if there’s been a similarity of background and experience. But some foes remain. “I shall never forgive” runs like poison. It sours memory. It inhibits trust. It stirs regret, even years later. Lifelong enemies can be ghostly, even when dead.

Adam Broadford, in his ‘ADMISSION, A Story Born of Africa,’* forgives the trespasses of others, despite their vile transgressions against his body, his psyche, and his spirit. But one person, in particular, Aikimbo, cannot forgive Adam. After a 20-or-so year gap, and during Rhodesia’s border warfare, when Adam is caught dangling by his ankle on a trap-wire, Aikimbo confronts him. Despite their childhood transgressions of foolhardiness and arrogance, their old enmity is suspended in the moment, wrought vulnerable by circumstance, and fate itself is in the offing.

“I’d get that seen to,” Glenn Snooke, (of Canada’s Denman Island,) once advised me from the experience of his septuagenarian age. “It can lodge so deep in the skin that I’ve known blokes to suffer from its itch even a decade or so later.” He was talking about cedar splinters. He’d watched me manhandle a cedar log against my bare skin. And now, more than thirty years later, I remain grateful that he was there, that he saw the incident, that he spoke into my life. The itch continues. Bits of splinter still emerge. (Thanks to Glenn, I pass the immediacy of his advice on to those who might, years later, wonder at the reasons one may still itch, in any instance.)

But some itches we do not necessarily need to redress. When the poison of a bitter directive at oneself gets received, some twenty years later, it helps to be compassionate, contrite, humbled, and sympathetic. But it does not do to receive the dart into the bull’s eye of one’s being, and so to sully the present with the other’s ongoing enmity. There are some things in the past that occurred because of immaturity, ignorance, and indisposition. Yes, too many harms can be created by intentionality too. And yes, accountability, responsibility, and recompense are all measures that mankind may exact of the transgressors. Best not to forget. But in the face of way leading onto way, one can learn to forgive, accept, and integrate the misspent passions of the past, particularly if the guilty party acknowledged complicity and regret. Such are the things we can give to our family members, our friends, our familiars, and even to our foes, one hopes.

But for Adam Broadford, caught up in the mid-century African culture of physical and mental abuse, legalized racism, social fragmentation, negative a-judgements, and an inescapable conscription to unending expectations from family, friends, familiars, and foes, there eventually appears no other recourse than to extract himself from the ongoing jabs and darts of the hateful, hurtful, spiteful, and vengeful. He absconds. But even so, he can forgive, does forgive, although he may not so readily forget.

So too for you?

                                                                                            On Facebook, By Nicola Samori

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Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!

Giants are most often invisible. They lurk inside us. They round the corners of the brain, clutch at our hearts, and trip us up. We do not necessarily suspect their presence. We are not readily aware that they inhabit us. We do not easily realize that the fear they can instill in us arose in our childhood, in our youth, and in our heretofores.

Adam Broadford, in ‘ADMISSION, a Story Born of Africa’, remains haunted by a giant in his path. He knows it. It prevents him ever disclosing the truth, the whole truth, to anyone. It always prevents him having open disclosure, having complete trust, or being free ‘just’ to be. Always, there is a giant called Fear and Disgust and Shame, depending on the circumstances. And given that Adam was a three-year-old child when this giant figure came to invade his innocence, despoil his future, and cloud his trust, he can but continue to keep the giant at bay by never revealing its presence. To disclose it to someone else is to make it too real. To unpack it before the prying eyes of others, and to have the past, his private past, entirely besmirched by the austere judgement of others, is to be too open to the certain vilification awaiting him.

Then too, there is the murder he committed when he was a boy. But that giant of a secret Adam feels he more readily can keep at bay. Besides, no one would really blame him. At least, no one he knows that is ‘white’.

South Africa had a legalized giant named ‘Apartheid’*. It meant that anyone looking ‘black’, be they Hindu, Pakistani, Chinese, Cape Coloured, or any member of the ‘dark races’, could not partner with a white person, could not date, could not marry, could not even ride in the same vehicle together. South Africa also legislated against homosexuals. It ruled against integrated schools. It created entrenched cultural distinctions with naturally separate values for the Bantu, the Afrikaner, and the English. At the time of Adam Broadford’s parents meeting in the 50’s, although both white, there was much cultural disapproval that an Englishman would date an Afrikaner girl, much less ‘have to’ marry her! Times, history, values, and concepts do change. But the giants of Shame and Fear can continue to haunt the populace at large. There are the indiscretions of the past. There are the lies they told their friends, their families, their partners. The giants of Self-Service do much to prove one Selfish. The giants of Shame do much to keep one Secretive. And the giant of Fear can keep one clandestine, haunted, and even Irrational.

We fear bees, and lions and tiger and bears, oh my! We fear hate and hurt and harm. We hide from trouble. We seek escape from threat. We can cauterize the bleedings that will give us lifelong scars, even though it be in the heart, where we think others may not see. But the giant shadows of the past linger on. They continually arise, unshakeable even in the light of our new understandings. They can be obscure, and obfuscated, just as we can be. We can tilt at them. We can make them larger than they actually loom. We can in our anxiety pay obeisance, homage, and sacrifice ourselves to them. Some we can even give names, call out their histories, and unwind the very coil within which they shuffle. Some we smudge at, misaligning their very sharp edges in our memory. But as diminished as the giants may become, so long as recollection itself is a tool of memory, there will be a word, a phrase, a smell, a look, a touch of someone’s skin that all by itself can rise up in us the giants of Fear, Despair, or Shame.

“Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!”** calls the giant. And for Adam Broadford, English as he was in a predominantly Afrikaans culture, it was a call to all that he was made to be ashamed of; a child who takes after his father, a backseat brat made to be shamed by his ‘very’ English past.

We can learn to slay giants.  But can we ever rid ourselves of their memory? Adam Broadford sets off to find that much out. And you? Do you go to battle with your giants too?

*Apartheid era[Wikipedia]

Under South Africa's ruling National Party from 1948 to 1994, homosexuality was a crime punishable by up to seven years in prison; this law was used to harass and outlaw South African gay community events and political activists.^[12]

Despite state opposition, several South African gay rights organisations formed in the late 1970s. However, until the late 1980s gay organisations were often divided along racial lines and the larger political question of apartheid. The Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), based in the Hillbrow district in central Johannesburg, was a predominantly white organisation that initially avoided taking an official position on apartheid, while the Rand Gay Organisation was multi-racial and founded in opposition to apartheid.^[13][14] In the country's 1987 general election, GASA and the gay magazine Exit endorsed the National Party candidate for Hillbrow, Leon de Beer. The campaign brought to a head the tensions between LGBT activists who overtly opposed apartheid and those that did not. In the wake of the election campaign, GASA declined and was superseded by the Cape Town-based Organisation of Lesbians and Gays Against Oppression (OLGA).^[15]

From the 1960s to the late 1980s, the South African Defence Force forced white gay and lesbian soldiers to undergo various medical "cures" for their sexual orientation, including sex reassignment surgery.^[16] The treatment of gay and lesbian soldiers in the South African military was explored in a 2003 documentary film, titled Property of the State. 

**  "Fee-fi-fo-fum" is the first line of a historical quatrain (or sometimes couplet) famous for its use in the classic English fairy tale "Jack and the Beanstalk". The poem, as given in Joseph Jacobs' 1890 rendition, is as follows:

Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I'll grind his bones to make my bread.^[1]

Though the rhyme is tetrametric, it follows no consistent metrical foot; however, the respective verses correspond roughly to monosyllabic tetrameter, dactylic tetrameter, trochaic tetrameter, and iambic tetrameter. The poem has historically made use of assonant half rhyme.

Origin[edit]

The rhyme may have originated with the ballad Childe Rowland.

It appears in the pamphlet Haue with You to Saffron-Walden (published in 1596) written by Thomas Nashe (who mentions that the rhyme was already old and its origins obscure):^[2]

Fy, Fa and fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman

In William Shakespeare's play King Lear (c. 1605),^[2] the character Edgar exclaims:

Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.

The verse in King Lear makes use of the archaic word "fie", used to express disapproval.^[3] This word is used repeatedly in Shakespeare's works: King Lear shouts, "Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!", and in Antony and Cleopatra, Mark Antony's exclaims, "O fie, fie, fie!"

The earliest known printed version of the Jack the Giant-Killer tale appears in The history of Jack and the Giants (Newcastle, 1711) and this,^[2][4] and later versions (found in chapbooks), include renditions of the poem, recited by the giant Thunderdell:

Fee, fau, fum, I smell the blood of an English man, Be alive, or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread.[1]

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he living, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to mix my bread.[5]

Charles Mackay proposes in The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe that the seemingly meaningless string of syllables "Fa fe fi fo fum" is actually a coherent phrase of ancient Gaelic, and that the complete quatrain covertly expresses the Celts' cultural detestation of the invading Angles and Saxons:

·         Fa from faich (fa!) "behold!" or "see!"

·         Fe from Fiadh (fee-a) "food";

·         Fi from fiú "good to eat"

·         Fo from fogh (fó) "sufficient" and

·         Fum from feum "hunger".

Thus "Fa fe fi fo fum!" becomes "Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger!"^[6]

Thanksgiving Transitions

Waiting in a Medical clinic, Thanksgiving Day, takes on many forms. Some people are at dinner. Others, like the poor souls around me, await the next phase of their sorry fate. Thing is, aren’t we all, in any case, like turkeys being led to some eventual end in which the leftovers are used and used, until we are forgotten in the grand sweep of progress?

There are two meta-narratives that drive mankind’s meanings. First is the Positive Paradigm of the hopeful, the progressive, the accreting. Second is the Negative Paradigm of the enervating, the disillusioned, the depleting. Throughout history there have been the doomsayers, and there has been the venturers. The latter have driven us toward the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Industrial, and the Technological Revolution. They will drive us among the stars. Eventually we shall discover other places to inhabit. Eventually we shall reach Oneness. Already there is a marriage between technology and biology. Eventually we shall transform with the inevitability of The Singularity. But that very ‘inevitability’ is what the Doomsayers and the Naysayers and the Enervators are arguing against. Too many species are dying. The oceans are dying. The earth cannot sustain us (all). We are in the proverbial hand-basket on our unsteady way to an over-warned metaphor: the end is near!

Thing is, tangents take us out of our trajectory. Without them we become inured to change that is not too unsettling, such that our adaptability goes with the flow. It allows for our taking on some major changes (like Blue Tooth connectivity changing land-line-based lives,) and it shuffles along readily enough without alarming our mortal coils. But wrenched by some tangent we do protest. Ask Martin Luther. Ask Galileo. Ask Kepler, or Copernicus. Ask all those who envisaged a new world view, or promulgated a new paradigm, or who were violently opposed by those who misunderstood, or were virally threatened by an already established Old World Order.

Medical clinics can have that effect. People walk in, unsure. Some walk out with terrible news, their futures curtailed, their happiness severely tested. Such is inequity. Such are the tragedies that befall us. One moment one is having a respite from the dictum of ‘doing’ all the live-long day, the next a phone call startles one into the dreadful news that a loved one has been the victim of some accident. And in the accommodation of the new event, in the adjustment, and in the progress of the days and months and years that will not erase having to have lost a loved one, or having, in oneself, to become handicapped, adversely affected, or incrementally debilitated by the tragedy, therein lies the taking on of a new paradigm. We are creatures of habit, acquiring new habits. And our choices, sometimes, are not as freely up to us as we’d like.

“Come on down, you’re the next contestant,” Nurse Nelia, invites. She shows no compassion-fatigue, despite her evident seniority. She is gracious as a new patient arrives. Some are open and at ease with ‘the problem’, others lean forward, confidentially. Yes, we are but bits and bodies needing bolstering. We are but flesh. And within the mortal coil we each indeed do shuffle.

Dichotomies, as absolutes, are an anathema to integration. Everything is a little of this, if not more of that. Who among us is entirely right or left brained? And depending on the need, so we adopt our usage. Adept, capable, we still do not necessarily make wise choices. Maturation, insight, intuition, and circumspection allow for the progress of history to unfold, as Desiderate might’ve had it, ‘as it would’. And as for the prognosis, why, that becomes the private if not public recognition of the moment, measure for measure. Within that grand meta-narrative, we each can but try to stay healthy.

Come, let us give thanks, Individual by individual, taking on our tangents as we do, in order that the collective may be better served. But not just on Thanksgiving Day. After all, one does not easily know just when, “You’re the next contestant.”