Moving Metaphors

We are so dependent on our batteries. We are so dependent on the vessels that buoy us. Even afloat, we have the swirl of potential and possibility happening around us. Logs can suddenly surface. Big obstacles can impede one’s flow. Waterfalls plunge. Rapids rock. Driving too. The traffic can be so very unpredictable. Just like life. We contain ourselves in the shell of our exoskeleton and hope that all our memories, all our treasures, all our luggage, stays intact. Even though we may not handle all of it our self. Along the way, we must entrust to others much of what once was ‘just’ ours. But even so, wrapped up, boxed, locked in the trunk, and hidden from view, very many of our treasures do not get seen until we ourselves unwrap them.

Adam Broadford (in his: Admission, A Story Born of Africa; as well as in his: Transition, From Africa to Canada) finds a constant need to rely on his own battery. It is the vital source impelling him from place to place, from predicament to predicament. So too for each of us. But admittedly, Adam has an extraordinary set of challenges, much beyond the average experience. His need to keep himself charged up, ready for reaction and response, becomes habitual. Most of us, thankfully, may take things more easily.

Yet all batteries can lose their juice. Compartmentalized, each cell does its thing, yet is essentially interdependent on the others. Like the Johari Window. It’s four panes look both outwards and inwards. 1) We see ourselves as others see us. 2) They see things in us we do not see. 3) We know things about ourselves that others do not know. 4) And then there’s the unknown that neither of us know. So? What is it that invigorates one to open one’s window to the outside world and invite change, impel the move to yet another place? How does one maintain a sense of equilibrium within the resultant flight from one place to another? Does a yacht not pitch and yaw to the rigging of the sails? Does a plane not shudder and gyrate in the turbulence? Does a car not screech at corners too sharp, squeal at sudden stops? And does the body not ache from the muscular adjustments to the variant slopes of the floor, the shudder of lifting packing boxes, the unending sorting of one’s stuff? Even pack horses must sometimes go uphill. Even steam trains need sand on the rails to prevent the big engine’s drive wheels slipping and squealing against the incipient threat of sliding backwards. Buffeted by winds, the free bird on the wing adjusts. But not all is a voyage with wings outspread to the ease of thermal dynamics.

But ‘bad’ batteries do not respond to kick-starts, push starts, or even to patience. Kaput, they give but an ineffectual clicking at the starter. And then, with one’s bonnet open, and the jumper cables, like blood red and old black placenta dangling, awaiting vital connection, well, it can be an awkward thing. Help. Please. Someone must stop; and have the generosity of spirit to regenerate the evidently immobile.

We move. Most of us move without much thought to the effort it takes to rise from inertia and to go about one’s daily gig. For some, each movement costs. For some, a steeling of reserves and intention and objectives becomes essential to lift a mere cup of sustenance, never mind the focus needed to move boxes, furniture, stuff. And the batteries are best removed from clocks that may be packed away for a year. But the battery in the vehicle, well now, that best be changed. Especially after packing up and needing a boost, twice, within the last fortnight.

We move into the unknown. The new place; the new city; the new friends to make; the new adventures to have. At issue is whether one moves horizontally (despite the accretion of yet more to know, and to have,) or moves vertically, acquiring yet more insight, more clarity, more enlightenment. That Johari window is most easily rendered with four equal panes. But real life is not about equality. Is it? We each are not given the same. We each take on different paths. And we each use our batteries according to the will within. Especially when adult. Especially when given license to be independent; and most especially, when free to move.

Still, best to keep one’s battery charged. Best to renew the old one. And best to have jumper cables handy in case we need help. After all, we’re never really, truly, independent. Are we?

Grist For The Grail

Since antiquity we have searched for The Grail. Alas, its elusive quality remains ephemeral. We can but briefly attain it. Out there, beyond ourselves, it might be felt or glimpsed or realized in a moment of consciousness, in happiness with an object, or in a paradigm shift of apprehension that evolves our sometimes-sluggish psyche. But always, it is attained comparatively briefly, before we must be off and on The Quest, for yet more. After all, stasis goes nowhere. And deep in the atavistic instinct of each us, surely as we each indeed were the winning 'swimmer' to attain fusion with the fertility of being born, we are profoundly restless. We want more. We want somewhere else. We needs be doing, be going, be producing, be attaining, be fabricating, and even be sustaining. Movement is all. Who can sit still, always? Eventually, we want elsewhere.

So long as The Grail is elsewhere, we shall pursue it. Given that it be something beyond our inner selves, we shall never be happy. We can forget our essence. We can forget the precise moment by moment of The Now. We hanker. We yearn. We fear being selfish. We understand that our ‘real’ connection, since birth, is essentially about interconnection. To survive, we first needed a parent. Then we wanted a family to fit into. After that we wanted to establish our individuality. Competition gave us status. Then we gave of our individuality an allegiance to a larger group, subscribed to our parental or self-chosen religious base, subsumed ourselves to an established organization, or affiliated ourselves to a political base. Fence sitting is felt to be too wobbly. One needs to declare oneself a part of This or That. And to have one’s feet straddling two camps is often construed as betrayal of another’s paradoxical singularity of cherished ideals. Integration comes slowly. It can wear the cloak of arrogance. At worst, it does not without contempt suffer fools. At best, it creates the illusion of benevolence. After all, without oneself at the helm, where would one’s ship of state be? And then, realizing that the very ship one sails is depending on the egalitarian equitability of all counterparts, one may well yoke the entirety of mankind into a collective, (yet still deem all those who misunderstand an umbrella of protectionism to be essentially misdirected.) After all, some are fools, idiots, and even oxygen thieves. Full Integration, compassion, absorption, assimilation, and acceptance comes but slowly. After all, just who do you think you are? Indeed, to differentiate so drastically from the generality of the acculturated contention of one’s compatriots is to have entirely to be self-reliant, to have hold of The Grail, to know peace with every moment, and who among us is always ‘there’. No, peace has its place; and then one moves on. Irritation, grief, annoyance, dissatisfaction, incompletion, and wont impels us elsewhere. The Quest persists. After all, as even John Wayne (that icon of manly and independent self-actualization) is purported to have said, “we can cry more comfortably in a Mercedes than we can on a bicycle seat.”

Cycling alone up the east coast of Great Britain, and desperately fearful of being apprehended by the police, Adam Broadford was in search of The Grail. In the sequel novel to his Admission, A Story Born of Africa, Adam makes the transition from Africa to England, then to Scotland, the remote Orkney Islands, and finally to the frigid north of Canada. His story, called Transition, is actually more about the inner journey toward enlightenment than it is about the outer journey of geographical displacements. For Adam, being essentially autotelic, meta-cognitive, and impelled by an entelechy (an innate drive) to surmount and surpass the circumstances of his birth and upbringing, he strives to transition from a world of victimhood to a world of choice. Many of the cages in which one dwells are cages of one’s own acceptance of circumstance. For Adam, creating a life of freedom for circumspection; for freedoms of choice; taking advantage of varied opportunity; and taking on a chosen citizenship (as opposed to being compelled by the circumstances of birth and acculturation,) his journey is of one of adventure and excitement, yet also a journey of profound inner transition. One learns to forgive the past.

The Quest is ongoing. The Grail is always there, however fleetingly observed. Thing is, to awake each day to its presence. Our interconnection, our integration, that’s grist for The Grail.

Of Truth in The Tales

Ask Dorothy, our imaginings can bear fruit, (oh my!) To be here, or to choose not to be there, is the question. So very much is predicated on our choices. (Woody Allen has it that 80% of life is just showing up.) Yes, when we act, we do contact the future. Even the actions of our thoughts, like silken silvered threads, can connect with materializations, so that long-ago friendships can be rekindled, or our more immediate ones we may allow to fragment. Our actions stir. We give energy a form with our constructs. Words matter. Images do too. Concrete words create imagery.

Yes, twixt truths and tales lies a colourful tapestry of one’s past. Yet golden-yellow bricks may but be clunky concrete through our personal chronology. Old decades become specific years; are months; are days; are hours; are right now. (You’d think we need no reminder.) Yet without an ontology, or our suspending disbelief in our meaning-makings, we may become but robotic. We do this. We do that. Our choices can become uni-linear. This is better than that. Honesty is better than lies. Dicotyledonous, we can eschew multidimensionality. We grow more left than right, or is it ‘righter,’ than left? Even then, our accretion may be but horizontal, scarcely vertical. We do not necessarily evolve in our paradigm shifts. Should we not, intentionally, aim at wisdom and insight, we can grow bitter, unloving, cynical, and distrusting. We can close ourselves off to forgiveness, to hope, to love, and to growth. We may just choose: This, which is better than That. No abstractions about it!

Truths and Tales dominate Adam Broadford’s extraordinary past. As the protagonist, the narrator, in his ‘Admission, A Story Born of Africa;’ and in his, ‘Transition, from Africa to Canada,’ he makes constant choices. Truths are necessary; his tales give them meaning. (Yes, Dorothy meets the tin man, lion, and scarecrow. But by twisting at the tale, it can bedevil those who know ‘the real’ Truth.)

Then again, we do like to know the truth. “Did you really kill?” someone asks. And as questions become more intimate, so too do my deflections. After all, a novel is just that: a work of fiction. (Still, I would not set my novel in Paris, or Turkey, having never been to those places.) No, it’s better to write from what one knows. It makes the passages more visceral. It makes experience more real. It makes the story, the tale, more believable. It gives scope and dimension and insight a chance to dance. Yes, novels, we know, are not the truth. One ought best, when reading a novel, (like being absorbed in any theatrical play, or when captivated by a film,) suspend one’s disbelief.

Yes, that one might learn something is not always the goal of entertainment. Catharsis is not so much a paradigm shift of apprehension as much as it is a release from the constancy in our containment of the self. Catharsis, in Plato’s realization of it, can be achieved in the moment of utter and total absorption in the shadows on the wall, such that one momentarily forgets the self.  As such, comedy and tragedy, like the iconic masks of theatre, are indeed yoked. (Indeed, too much of didacticism, of preaching, of persuasion, or even of teaching, can be much off-putting.) 

Yet for me, specifically, I most enjoy something created that engages me more than a temporary sense of relief from the self, (pretty as a perfectly or abstractly painted vase of flowers may be). I prefer stretching into other precepts and percepts, or my yielding into the sense of spiraling on a tangential path, so that the wondering and wandering and time spent with another’s work may leave me, specifically, feeling that my time was well spent. Indeed, to be here, or to choose not to be there, remains the question. And choosing the pathways that are less trod, in deeds, may make all the difference. (Truth be told.) Abstraction, indeed, is among the great treasures of life!

Gradual Gradations

           The Integrative Gradation Theory: (by Richard Michelle-Pentelbury)



            “Adam? What one word sums up your understanding of life?”

            “Grades,” the word came out. He wanted to explain, ‘but not in actual years; it is about one’s individual insights, progressing through the grade levels, in ‘the school of life,’ and about us all, all of us, being simultaneously in the various lessons, our individual integration dependent on our own handling of life’s curriculum. To wallow, or to grow.’

            But Thom, the older man asked: “As in ‘mental age’?  Different from our actual age?”

            “Yes. We have different degrees of innate intuition.”

            “To what purpose?”

            “To contribute to the health of the whole. To learn.”

            “Will we ever stop learning?”

            Adam laughed. “There will always be continuing education.”

            “And who is in Grade Two? And who in Grade Three, or Four?”

            “All of us. Simultaneously. In some things one may be in multiple grades, but in some things, predominantly, living chiefly in a given grade. We ascend, depending on our own perceptions, our own taking in of lessons. We grow, or wallow, given individual understanding, by our insight on any given aspect of progress. It is not for the lesson to teach All, but for us to learn All from the Lesson. Tadpole to frog. Caterpillar to butterfly. At a sophisticated insight, we may become dimly aware of something to yet learn, while processing yet another lesson, chiefly, at a ‘grade three.’ One may even be in high school, while trapped in aspects of a ‘grade one’ lesson. Kindergarten, or University; our ascending, our ‘aging,’ is not dependent on real-time.”

            “This is positive and negative? Grade-One being negative, compared to Grade-Thirteen?”

            “Not necessarily. A person chiefly in Grade Two is better asked to be the best that he can be, within Grade Two. We progress toward the next grade, independent of physical age. A given child may be wiser than an elder. Still, it could be foolish, inadvisable, to ask either the Grade Two child, or Grade Two elder, ‘entirely’ to practice the more mature Grade Six, or to accommodate an inappropriate aspect of more complex lessons, for most lessons are there for all to see, or hear, almost all the time. We each do as we can within our own understandings, our own awareness.”

            “I see. Do we all get ‘older’? Do we all, invariably, progress up this graduated ladder?”

            “Yes, and no. If by ‘we,’ you mean the individual, the ‘I, me, mine,’ then not necessarily. If you mean by ‘we,’ the collective, the amalgamation of like-mindedness, the gathering together of fragments in order to progress toward the next junction, or level, then ‘yes,’ we collectively evolve, progress, contribute, ascend, but each by each, contributing, yet not simultaneously.”

            “Wonderful! So, you’re saying we do not necessarily retain our ‘individual’ identity once we’re dead, but fragment, spiritually, and regroup into some other evolving individual, as it were.”

            “Ha! Constructs are but a theory, I am thinking. Some of us are personally sure. Some say, ‘possibly, yes.’ Some say, ‘definitely no!’ Some identify, piecemeal. And we may integrate not just once we’re dead. We can connect, spiritually, and become collective even while alive. It all is One. But dead, some, I am thinking, may maintain selfhood. Ghosts. Others may yield themselves up, fragment, into the greater whole. Down here, alive, some are of one people, one tribe. Others free themselves only to come together in yet another grouping, made of many different tribes, but now dependent on the new collective. That is why one is better off, I am now thinking, comfortably alone. Alone, yet connected to all. Alone, yet intentionally learning. Alone, we are to find our own truths.”

            “I see. Are truths, individual or collective, ‘wrong,’ or ‘right’?”

            Adam smiled, remembering an answer to that sort of question, so very long ago: “I am thinking, truths as constructs are neither completely wrong, nor entirely right, except in the minds of those whose thinking makes it so. We allow for all. We integrate all. We accept all. Ha!”

            “Hmm. Evil too? We can ‘allow’ it? And besides, what of those lesser things than us? Animals. Stones. Grass. Other material things. How do they fit into this theory?”

            “It all is in One!” Adam laughed. “But just like people, some are ‘denser’ than others. Concentrated. Evil is intentionally destructive. Purposefully harmful. Dullness thinks little of consequence. Some energy is slower. Less reactive. Less responsive. But it all is One. Energy. And it moves, feels, breathes. And we all know, somewhere down deep, whether our part in it is healthy, or feeling ‘off,’ or ill, or selfish. Even a bare room, or this home of yours, I am thinking, has a feeling, even when we are gone from it. We give energy. Positive, a concept, can be suspect, fake. And so too can Negative. Yet we all share energy. It all is One. We may choose to be healthy, to contribute to the health of the whole, or we may choose to be self-centered, to focus only on that which we want, which we understand, which we hold dear. And most of us feel ourselves fitting somewhere in between it all, aware, but not aware, depending on the circumstances, the lessons, the impetus of our own lives. It all makes for One, in the end. Ha! Sorry, I’m preaching.”

            “In the end? What end?”

            Adam reflected. “Change. We all recognize that the change of one thing to another brings about an ‘end.’ So too will this universe perhaps collapse and fragment and change into other things, eventually. Unrecognizable things. Even as the caterpillar, I am thinking, never exactly suspects that it will become a butterfly, but deep down, somewhere in its subconscious, its ‘other-knowingness,’ I surmise, it knows it is surely and steadily on a path of metamorphosis. Change.”

            “And it is better to be a butterfly than a caterpillar?”

            “Ha! That too is a matter of perception. Tadpole, or frog? But most helpful to us all is the common feeling that we reach for, that we think of, that we prepare for: something better. Ha! Even those who think only of making ‘the now’ the very best that they can make it, day by day, for all of us, make our tomorrows ‘better.’ Healthier.”

            “And you? What grade are you in?”

            “Well, certainly not at Graduation Day, ha! Then again, the same as anyone else: in every grade, simultaneously. Parts of all. Yet wherever we are most comfortable, where our awareness feels the most accord, there we are most to be found. Whatever is, ‘predominant.’ So too are the grade levels, or gatherings, or given societies, for each of us, and all. Yet we are all One.”

            “And what would the advantage of our understanding be that we progress through Grades?”

            “Compassion. We could, I am thinking, allow the one mostly in Grade Seven to progress predominantly within that grade, knowing he will eventually pass through it. We may evaluate ourselves, our own reactions, our own grade, which, ideally, is more about ‘integrating,’ being considerate, than is our having a negative attitude, or judging. We too were once in Grade Two. So too might we take more responsibility for some Grade-Two soul, so that he does not, as an older mentor once said, ‘We do not just allow for the child to fall down the stairs!’ Ha!”

            Thom paused. “Hm. So, is there such a thing as predestination?”

            “Hm? Predestination pretends at certainties. One thinks one is important enough that some Overlord, in the fact of the burgeoning billions of us, can take time out to care for just one special little me? Ha! There is but choice! Response, and reaction. Grow, or wallow. Lessons. Grades.”



SEE: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190617-deep-ethics-the-long-term-quest-to-decide-right-from-wrong?ocid=global_future_rss&ocid=global_bbccom_email_18062019_future

Costly Confessions

Once she admitted it, he became vengeful for the rest of her life. She was 87. He was 92. They’d been married 63 years. But shortly after they were married, 1942, while he was away at the war, and she had not heard from him in seven months, she presumed him dead. So did their family and friends. And she took comfort, eventually, in the arms of a friend of theirs. How many times? Well, does that signify? When he found out, he didn’t care. Once was too many. But for 62 years, he never knew about it, luckily. So, when he returned from the prison camp, he had enjoyed the presence of his wife, and she his, and they had had children, and adventures, and expeditions, living in a sense of love and fidelity. Until June, of five years ago. On moving (given his need for a house with no stairs,) an old shoebox spilled open from his fingers. He found the letters. And the birthday cards. They were wrapped in a purple ribbon. And they were dated 1942. And they proved that his wife, despite being married to him, so young, at the outset of the war, had been unfaithful. Way back then. How many times? It did not matter; once was enough.

Carly Simon sings, “Sometimes I wish, sometimes I wish, you never told me, some of those secrets of yours”.

Children soon learn to lie. Creativity, aggrandizement, yes. But often, a need for escape. Harsh parents make the consequences for truth not worth it. If truth were (always) received as a mark of honour, of courage, of integrity, then many of us would more readily admit to the errant passages of our times. But given an admission, derision, shame, judgment, and penalty have cowered most. We learned that others do not necessarily understand. Our teachers, our elders, our peers, do not necessarily have compassion. A single slip-up, like “the time you stole the chocolate bar when you were seven,” can have one branded by a parent as a thief, or liar, for the rest of one’s life. Tell me the truth now, which of us has never told a lie?

Adam Broadford, in ADMISSION, A Story Born of Africa, struggles for survival. He finds the need to obscure the truth, over and over. The cultural paradigms of his upbringing, given South Africa’s strictures against racial integration, homosexuality, and even secularism, disallows Adam to lead an invigorated life of exploration, integrity, and truth. Brutal consequences lie in wait if people know what was in his past. Harsh punishment, dreadful shame, and even imprisonment await him should his illicit liaison across the colour-bar be discovered. And dishonourable discharge, or worse, would befall him once his AWOL from an embittered, and desperately apartheid regime, was known. He had to escape!

But in the lies we tell ourselves, and others, do we ever escape? Is the insidious snake of truth always lurking, slithering up into our consciousness each time we know we are living with a lie?

“You cannot handle the truth,” declares the inimitable Jack Nicholson, in A Few Good Men. It is a line that resonates. It dances with the song, Takes Two to Tango, by Eartha Kit. One needs not only to be honest with oneself, but to handle honesty from others too. Forgiveness, let alone affirmation of the self, is differentiated from the wrong-doing of the deed. How else consciously to learn but through the making of mistakes? Do we have to leave “no stone unturned?”

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” wrote Walter Scott, (not Shakespeare,) in Marmion, in 1808. Evidently, love triangles have invaded lives ‘forever’. Our lack of something, and the need to have a desire fulfilled, has us breaking boundaries, despite the fear of consequence. In childhood, and in adulthood too. We betray others, or ourselves. It takes much maturation, and a distinct integrity, entirely to be ‘greater than human.’ Betrayal, in its various guises, (from the addictive mind to the occasional dalliance,) is about just how much one can get away with. Still, for the guilty octogenarian, as above, and her hard nonagenarian, might it not have been better for her to have thrown that old shoebox of memories.... away?

Absolute Anger

There is nothing like it. At least, that’s how the usual advertisement goes. There’s nothing like marmite on toast. There’s nothing like the rain in Spain. There’s nothing better than…. Nothing like vanilla! No belief like…. And then, “How dare you touch my things? I’m absolutely furious!”

Absolutes dominate. They get launched in declarative phrases that are designed to swallow one whole. We are susceptible to their impetus, and are supposed to go shop, and to try on, and even to go to places we’ve never been before. After all, there’s nothing like a tequila sunrise. Nothing like morning coffee. Nothing like a hiding! Nothing like being shamed. Nothing like….

Yes, girding oneself against the grievous onslaught of those who would grab out of one’s purse becomes an exercise in discernment. (Huh? Ok. Watch how one spends one’s pennies!) It is not easy to determine that nothing is true. Well, absolutely true. Ok then, if concrete facts are irrefutably true, then what about the fact that nothing beats a fair election. Nothing? Midst the extremes, surely, is the happy hunting ground, whether in the grocery store, comparisons in any given fish pond, or even among the clouds of hope and possibility. Nothing like dreams! We want a slice of the pie, at least. The perseverance of hope persists. There’s nothing like it.

Absolutes tend to slide us toward the slippery slope of disillusionments, or elevate us toward the improbable. We’ve absolutely got to clean our house. Dust! Yet we’ve reached the moon, and mars. We’ve come out of caves. We’ve turned our stones into tools, our clay into ores, our minerals into mechanization, and our ethers into chemical additives. We’ve conquered the world. We’ve increased our population density, exponentially, (despite the absolute fact that history has given us plagues and pestilence and wars.) And we absolutely know what we know, and even know what we don’t know. Absolutely. Well, absolutely partially, then, ok?

“But what boils my blood,” a friend used to say, “is that nothing gets accomplished by the incumbent party. They sit on their backsides and make absolutely no sense at all. And every bit of our tax money is wasted. And all of their time is wasted. And not one of us benefits. It all is a bloody shame!” Boiled blood, indeed. Nothing like sharing one’s irritation. Nothing like being annoyed. Nothing like reacting. Nothing like feeling so much of life is a waste of time.

Thing is, in-between all of the crisis of life there are the ‘perfectly’ average mundane moments of washing dishes, making the bed, doing the laundry, and catching up with correspondence. Or are they meant to be mundane? If everything is indeed to be made interesting (rather than something making things interesting for us) then so much as a soap bubble, an ant, a misspelt word, a stray thought, or a resurfaced feeling can be of interest, absolutely! (Well, alright then, 'somewhat'.) And if we are to live in a state of grace and gratitude, or even an awareness of enlightenment (as a journey rather than a product) then we are absolutely to find a sense of completeness within the moments, breath for breath, without waiting for some exterior provocation to prick us into sensibility. We are entirely responsible for ourselves, ultimately. Response needs dictate to a reaction, and reaction needs inform a response. After all, there is nothing like unbridled passion, whether in pleasure, or in pain. And anger is indeed a product of personal pain, or why take on so?

Absolute anger and absolute pleasure, as polar opposites, are impermanent at best. Life is a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, or maybe even the tunnel of horrors? But there is life, or......? So we need be ok with the ride, exercising choice wherever we can, accepting the state of things otherwise, and having the proverbial knowledge to go the distance. Nothing like it, for each of us. Unique, to each of us. And yet the same, for all of us. Breath for breath.

Absolutely angry at something? Yes, but in actuality, just for a little while. So too, one notes, for pleasure. La petite mort. It all, comparatively, is just momentary, for each of us. Nothing like it!

Constrained By Chaos

Chaos abounds. It breaks apart time. We cannot expect to live forever. We cannot expect to have every hope and dream and wish fulfilled. There are too many variables. There is too much misalignment. If expectation be the triumph of hope over experience, then caught up in the course of experience, one learns to allow for sand castles to be taken too.

Friends find themselves waylaid by vicissitudes. The vagaries of chance and accident and the sadly unexpected beleaguers them. This one has been in the hospital for six weeks now. That one has just suffered atrial-fibrillation. This one has just fallen off a buckling ladder, broken both wrists and an elbow. That one, suffering from undissolved embolisms, paid a second visit to the emergency department. This one... And so it goes. Old age is not for sissies. Yet children also wail from behind closed doors. Chaos attacks any age, in any decade. Chaos can be cruel, inconsiderate, and enervating. It robs. It destroys. We can despair with its relentless erosion of our preferred possibilities. And at times it can test our resilience, repeatedly. Yet not all is bad.

Adam Broadford, relating his ADMISSION, a Story Born of Africa, finds much of his life a turbulent challenge. Chaos envelopes him. But central to his resilient disposition is the perpetual determination not to react, but to respond. That which is cruel and brutal and awful has him determine to be different. That which fragments and breaks apart has him determine to become yet more accommodating, inclusive, integrative. There is always a tomorrow, and each day brings him closer to a time when he will be free to make choices independent of others. Children do not have those choices. But beyond the enclosing walls of secrecy and shame that Adam must countenance, there can be a good influence, if someone, somewhere, sometime, gets to know it.

The great adventurers lost to us, remain lost. Take Sir Robert Broadford. He left Britain and ventured with a small party into the heart of Africa, in the early1800’s, even before David Livingston. Problem is, he was never heard from again. In an age when mounting an expedition to go in search of a lost soul was fiscally, logistically, and materially very different from today’s ease with planes, trains, and automobiles, not to mention telephones and internet, Sir Robert’s life became ‘lost’. What he learned, is gone. But how many people, en route, did he not affect?

Point is, the interior journeys we each make are not always visible to others. The chaos we endure, as the fragmentation of our own ideals gets shattered, can remain concealed unless we succeed (let alone choose,) to bruit our finding abroad. And even then, which of our words do not get misinterpreted, what intentions do not get misconstrued, and what adventures do not find satisfactory conclusion? Yet just by living, itself, we affect others. The net effect, bit for bit in the annals of history, horizontal step for step, hierarchical spiral for spiral, engenders mans’ very progress within the greater chaos that has inveigled us all. We can but plan, and allow the Gods their laugh. It is in our response (as opposed to reaction) that we show conscious evolution. It is in our individual cognizance that we each contribute toward the bell-curve, shuffling it along the mortal coil inherent not only to each of us, but to any Time Period defining a given lifetime.

Adam Broadford stepped out of the box into which he was born. He needed to. Not everyone feels so compelled. But given our burgeoning refugee numbers, and given the dissolution of our old historical traditions and values and practices, it is evident that we, as mankind, are speeding up, comparatively, toward a future that some think they can foresee, that others think might be bright, and yet others feel is more akin toward heading into an abyss. And you? How fare you?