Month: October 2012

Reflections and New Beginnings

I love Spring and everything that this time of year brings and all it symbolises. The freshness in the air as all of nature celebrates new beginnings with the return of the sun and the rapidly lengthening days and shortening nights. The blue skies make me look back on storms of the past as a necessary part of the appreciation of the present. Caterpillars are busily going about their ways and a few days ago, I found one making its way across the sterile floor of our warehouse with the purpose that few apart from caterpillars have. I’m sure it thought it knew where it was going but of course it didn’t and I saw to it that it got safely moved outside and put on a better path. I remembered a day on the central line in London so many years ago, commuting from the City, as I watched a ladybird on the floor of the busy carriage, as oblivious to its surroundings as were the passengers to its presence, and oblivious too of the reality that at any instant its life could end with one unfortunate footstep. But the footstep never came and after watching it for some time with morbid fascination, I coaxed it onto my finger, took it out of that dark place and set it free on a leaf in the sun outside. I don’t think the ladybird understood or cared, but that didn’t matter; Life and liberation was my gift and the gift is for the giver.

So it’s with some appreciation that I view nature’s choosing September, the month of Spring, as the month of my beginning, fifty years ago. How time flies. It all seems to go by in the blink of an eye. How clear the childhood memories of looking upon people as old who we would now consider young, and somehow it doesn’t seem that we come to see ourselves as old even though through the eyes of a child we are. Perspective is everything. But we are defined more by the way in which we see than by the way in which we are seen.

I’ve always considered myself to be the master of my own fate, but increasingly I see a life shaped by the larger forces of circumstance. Or destiny. I suppose we like or need to feel that we’re in control, but are we really?  Perhaps in the details we are, but what about the larger realm? By chance we’re born into our cultures, faiths, and families.  By chance we meet people or have experiences that alter our lives.  Little by little, life’s chance happenings change our course and as they accumulate, guide us to destinations sometimes different to what we’d anticipated or planned. How fortunate then, to arrive at a good place.  How easily one wrong turn could have led elsewhere.  Somehow, in the end, I feel as though the Universe has conspired in my favour and that I have been given so much more than I was ever due.

Looking back, I can’t help but feel deep gratitude for the countless blessings that have always been there in such abundance. How easy it is to overlook them as we lose ourselves in the immediacy of our day-to-day lives.  I think that one of our greatest blessings is that which allows us to appreciate the true value of the blessings we already have; It turns out that like many of our most wonderful gifts, appreciation has a way of multiplying itself.

One of the things I appreciate most about life is the way that it’s offered me new perspectives along the way and never more so than in the recent past. They have left me with more faith in our innate humanity than ever before and feeling more connected, but at the same time with a deep sense of unease about what we’re allowing to happen, and with grave concerns about where the world is headed. Sometimes I look at the way we desecrate nature, or how we routinely treat people and animals in the most inhuman ways, and then I look at people around me going about their lives without an apparent care, and I wonder; am I the only one seeing the world this way? Perhaps they think the same of me, but if that’s so, then it only confirms the strange paradox that despite the abundance and sophistication of today’s communications, beyond the superficial we may be more disconnected from each other now than ever before. And although I feel connected, I’ve never felt more alone.

It’s seems to be the modern way to fill every open space with clutter, every idle pause with activity, every silence with noise.  We now say so much, but so little of consequence. The quiet voice drowns in cacophony.  Somehow, we have to find our way back,  to rediscover that it’s in the emptiness and silence of that idle moment that we have the chance to connect with the sacred and to find and embrace the heart of our humanity.

I can’t look at the issues facing us and give myself over to cynicism or hopelessness. Neither will I live in denial.  The only other course, daunting as it may sometimes be, is taking action and it’s a course that I feel myself increasingly drawn towards and defining my purpose. We can’t all do great things, but we can all try to be more honest and aware about the effects that our lives and our consumption have on other people, other living creatures, and all of nature. We can all search for truth and use it to undress evil. We can all dream of a better world and do little things to live and share our dreams, and in so doing, turn them into reality.

In truth, I’d never planned to climb Kilimanjaro this year or ever, and the dates for the expedition were set long before I knew about or became part of it. That it happened to be coincident with the full moon and my birthday was just another fortuitous accident in what I sometimes feel has been a life filled with a myriad such accidents. But despite its accidental origin, the expedition became symbolic for me – the ascent a fitting way to punctuate the life lived from that beginning. In years past, I never dwelt much on how I would feel when I got to 50, but had I done so, I would never have imagined that I would feel so full of purpose, dreams, and hope.