Thought Picnic: Choose your travel companions carefully

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Choose your travel companions carefully, they are usually rarely blood-related but the bonding that grows between you gives a daring sense of adventure that you won’t wish for another to share the experience.

The journeys you venture on in life come with perils and triumphs, you must think about who would support and succour you first in the wilderness and long before you get to the city comforts that mask the true nature of your company.

Know the wolf cries

Fairweather friends are many, feigning interest, love, and engagement, sometimes our discernment and the ability to be a judge of character deserts us and in the process, we face unexpected betrayal and hurt. To know the signs early is to be blessed beyond measure.

When you are following someone, do not follow them too close so that you cannot cut yourself loose when they are determined to end up in a ditch. You do not have to be collateral out of blind loyalty. Fall because of your misstep rather than out of using another’s eyes.

Know the person indeed

If your friends are your relations, you are probably lucky, in every case. judge a person on their own character and integrity and avoid allowing the corporate trust in an environment of allegiances like a place of worship, business, or a club to vouch for your association. Many have had their fingers burnt in being taken advantage of by malevolent people covered by community settings.

Be wary of sycophancy or bias, take the compliments and test the sincerity of anything that attempts to puff you up, between friends, honesty, frankness, openness, and bluntness does crucially matter. You need to know who would pull you out of the fire. They will always stand with you yet will not let you get away with bad behaviour. We all need accountability partners, cherish them with love, honour and respect.

Choose your travel companions wisely, that can be the difference between getting to your destination or perishing along the way.

Answering a challenge for eligibility

Looking at your vulnerable side

Having a sit down to talk and have a conversation with people for professional services is quite an interesting thing, especially where an assessment is being made of whether the professional or assessor can help you. The day before, I had met with a prospective buddy/mentor, we decided to meet again when it seemed there was no point of agreement or meeting of minds.

It was in a conversation with my consultant some weeks ago that we agreed that on her referral, I could avail myself of counselling rather than request it on my own pre-empting.

I think I have convinced myself that I am quite articulate, I have a disciplined or call it measured way of talking about myself that exudes qualities of clarity of mind, understanding of issues, elaboration of detail, and building relatable narratives.

Making sense of the complexities

Interestingly, for the first time, I linked together a whole range of life events walking backwards from situation to Genesis, a framework that had developed in the many blogs I had written but never laid out in a string of unintended and yet natural chain of occurrences.

The questions I was asked were supposed to elicit concepts and ideas upon which a decision could be made to put me in line for engagement, but it got to the point where it was first opined that I might not need the service and hence, I needed to assert by whatever means why I felt they could be of help.

An analogy for counsel provision

I had never thought of it before, it was like I was given utterance to address the challenge as I spoke. I started with every journey has a road to a destination, the destination sometimes is what is required and nothing else. However, consider if on that journey, you were driving and then you had a diversion or probably you had a tyre puncture that meant you had to stop to change the tyre.

That interruption to your journey is worth considering in terms of delaying you getting to your destination, bringing some new experience into view, what you might have run over to cause the puncture, how to avoid such punctures, like navigating another route, being conscious of the related hazards, and how to have a better journey.

The focus has moved from the destination to the experience in the journey which is part of the tapestry of life itself. Surely, all that is significant. I think that analogy helped considerably, he nodded, acknowledged how useful the illustration was and I think he was a bit more convinced that there was scope for me to access services.

In what I thought would be just an hour of conversation, over 90 minutes went into the chat that I found myself running late for my welcoming stint at the cathedral. Meanwhile, there is a waiting list and maybe soon, I would be getting a call.

In the solitude of the solitary

It is just me

It is the silence, the quiet stillness in a place of solitude in the company of just oneself that you find a spectrum of just wanting to be alone and the dread of loneliness. Your thoughts oscillating without any uniformity between a desirous need and an acceptance of lack, it could be disconcerting.

This long weekend presents that very scenario where at one time there was the prospect of receiving guests that was postponed to the next month, at the one time you feel you should jump on a train just to feel the energy of a crowd from afar, the sight of strangers with some purpose giving you a signal that you still exist even if you are not noticed.

It is just so

Then, there is lethargy, an overwhelming sense of inertia, where normalcy is not entirely so, as at least you are somewhat engaged even if you are working from home, but presently you are not. The curtains remain as they always were, undrawn that the outside is a mystery when asked about the weather.

For one Miss Havisham and I can be soulmates on the same voyage, though mine is not out of misery or disappointment and the clocks have not been stopped. It may not be out of commission, quite likely one of omission, as I just allow things to be as they are and trundle on.

I could do some cooking, but it is a table set for one, I could watch television, but the discussion goes on in my mind, I might read something, and the recognition is mine alone, or listen to something on the radio to be taken to a place of nostalgia and new meaning.

It is just there

What I have been blessed with, though I am given the joy of communication, but I cannot use fully for the distance between us. I have to trust myself that I am fine, though I found out at one time that it could mess with my head and set my emotions in flux, I hope I get my funk sorted long before that which warms my heart presents.

For now, I sail, a lonely mariner on a boat in storms, keenly aware of where I am going, but unsure of when I would arrive. An albatross perches on the mast to indicate, I might have a long way to go, but the winds are in my favour, and I should soon reach a safe harbour and that is where I am heading.

The parcel crawled like a sloth

Piling on the miles

This morning at 10:02 AM, I took delivery of a parcel that was despatched at 09:34 AM on Thursday the 7^th of May from Swansea. It had first been mooted that I should make the journey myself, it would have been a 12-hour round trip by rail, give or take an hour for unexpected events and probably a good thing too.

Meanwhile, I was sat at home tracking my parcel as it crawled the between 185.2 miles (298 km) and 231.2 miles (372 km) depending on the route taken to my stoep, stopovers at various depots could have added to the mileage.

Picked up for the rounds

As the tracking indicates, 67 minutes later, the courier picked up the parcel and registered it as collected 26 minutes later. It was probably in the courier van for another 6:05 hours whilst the courier picked up other parcels around Swansea. It eventually left Swansea 10:26 hours after it was despatched.

Tamworth is probably a major distribution and processing centre and if I recall, a recent international delivery was processed through Tamworth, some 173 miles (278.4 km) from Swansea being a 3-hour drive or by the tracking activity 3:23 hours. Then, 1:36 hours later, it left Tamworth for Manchester, a mere 86.9 miles (139.8 km) taking 28:04 hours to arrive, going by the science.

Lost a day to rest

Now, Friday was an unusual Bank Holiday, it would have been the preceding Monday, but the May Bank Holiday was combined with the 75^th anniversary of the Victory in Europe Day. I must say, these Coronavirus pandemic times softened the tone on the possible celebration of two Bank Holidays in a week apart of the Good Friday/Easter Monday and Christmas/Boxing Day holidays.

God forfend the UK Government gives up a day of toil, before big business wails about the loss of billions in profits because the people were allowed a day off. We would not have heard the last of it.

Cooling off in a depot

It was a given my parcel would not arrive on Friday, but Saturday presented a whole day of opportunities. The parcel finally left the Manchester depot at 06:03 AM this morning and arrived here at a minute short of 4 hours.

The courier rang my bell and though I was to sign for the parcel, he placed it on the stoep, signing on my behalf, he left before I was within 3 metres of him. At least my parcel had arrived, though it made me wonder if it would not have been better for me to pick it up rather than have it spend 3 days 23 hours and 21 minutes wending its way through a courier service.

Then again, you get what you pay for and it arrived just a day before the maximum estimated delivery time. I wrote this blog because monitoring the tracking process was much longer than watching paint dry and I still believe it would have been a mental health boost for me to visit Swansea than being caught in the suspense and expectations of a parcel in transit.

Thought Picnic: On a journey they cannot understand

Understanding my journey

As I was reviewing my Facebook timeline yesterday, I came a across a quote that I could relate to in every way, with respect to being afflicted and maybe not so much as it reflects on others.

I have paraphrased the quote a bit and having done a search, the providence is unknown.

“Not everyone will understand your journey. That's fine. It's not their journey to make sense of. It's yours to live your own life.”

My own journey

My journey as a life has been easy at the start, exciting at other times, interesting and intriguing at certain points and I dare say, difficult and challenging in the recent past.

My journey has literally and exclusively been mine even if I have walked part of the way in company or have been helped along to the way to reach the milestones that dot the road to a destination yet unknown.

Many parts of the journey some fully appreciate and other parts people are literally completely clueless, they are the secrets and recesses in life that have happened and become what I usually refer to as the story.

My hidden journey

Most interestingly, the greater part of my journey is literally unknown to my blood relations. For the affinity we might have, the truth is they cannot even begin to understand the difficult and challenging parts of my journey. Where some might have been interested in my journey, they seem to have a path they expect me to ply to a destination they have chosen and hope that I put my vehicle on that road without quibble – one such journey is the one of marriage.

I put paid to that suggestion in one clear statement in a conversation with my dad a few weeks ago, I categorically stated, it is not my life, the vehemence with which I made that statement seemed to both shocked and have effect, but it might well not be the end of that matter.

There were parts of that conversation that felt like checking if my balls had already descended into my ball sack, the ignorance of three decades of this journey will provide accommodation for disrespect and contempt, it comes with the territory.

My private journey

The truth is, the parts of the journey that they even think they know is hardly the journey that was my reality, there are elements of depression and sexual abuse that I have only better understood long after I was a victim in the care and the protection of people assigned to care for us.

However, one journey that has never been understood at all is the one where my life was almost extinguished by cancer in 2009 and the process of losing everything within three years of that.

They might have an inkling, probably an idea, but hardly the knowledge not the experience. It is not like anyone asked the questions that will elicit the responses that will intimate them of the reality of things. Yet, if this knowledge were shared unprompted, it will almost read like a pity party.

My unknown journey

Then again, in my leaving one of my homes, for my homes are many, I probably abandoned them and conversely, I should feel no hurt even when in my hour of need I felt I was somewhat abandoned. A stoicism and desire to chart my own course has always driven most of what I have sought to do and so in my rise and my fall and my rise again, I am just living my own life.

The truth is, they probably will never understand my journey, I do not expect them to understand any part of my journey, but where conflict does arise is where in their journeys which for each individual is unique and different, they forget that as long as you are not walking in the same shoes, on the same road, with the same mind and in the same person as the other, you might catch a glimpse of that journey, but you may still never make sense of that journey.

The Memories of a Castaway

The farewells

One bright morning just four weeks after returning from a business trip, he returned to the airport, with a one-way ticket in his hand.

The check-in was easy, and the absence of that pregnant customs officer who seized his passport just six weeks earlier asking for a handout was a great relief. He wondered whether the corrupt during gestation brought forth more corruption upon the earth.

It took the wiliness of his travel companion then to retrieve the passport after he palmed her filthy grubby hands with illicit silver.

His friends gathered, and he recollects, "we hugged and shook hands before we parted ways waving goodbyes without tears."

Bye for long

The scheduled take-off time had moved, and it was another five hours before they finally took to the air and one last glimpse of home became a distant memory of almost 23 years.

The boy is lost to one home and found in another home, affinities split between homes of ancestry and homes of birth, the latter bringing more satisfaction.

However, the passage of time comes with the experience of events and the news from afar of tales make sad songs a refuge for a season.

Lost for good?

What the boy has not suffered too badly is nostalgia, he can be removed and be placed in another place and another time to adapt. He has learnt to bargain for the best deal than challenge for the indifference of a rotten deal.

His people are growing older, his links are growing weaker; weighted down at times in seething resentfulness left unaddressed by conflicts that go back decades, all fondness suffering a contemn.

Sometimes, he really cannot be that bothered anymore, they have parted ways for so long that technology is just a tenuous link leveraged for convenience.

The boy is lost and not looking to be found.

Thought Picnic: Start that journey now

The journey

There are some difficult journeys we need to embark on in our lifetimes and making that decision to go on that journey can take time, resource and sometimes daring and courage – that little reserve you have left.

The amazing thing is when you start that journey, the foreboding of dragons and threats that seemed to seize your thoughts that you procrastinated and hoped for an alternative miracle just dissipate.

You might well find the dragons but having prepared for that journey you realise you are equipped to slay it if need be or befriend it and have to carry you through even more menacing jungles – like the Psalmist says – Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.

The journey is a story

There is that destination that you can only get to by embarking on that journey, you are given assurances beyond your capability that you will not only complete that journey but also complete it well.

Never forget to tell the story of your journey because the journey of life ticking away in seconds, jumping ahead in minutes and marking time in hours that days seem so long but months end so soon reveals in splendour the joy of living.

As bright days follow the darkest nights, the power of hope to expect, faith to attain and love to be secured can never be held back. I took the first step on my difficult journey and a world has opened before me that I would never have seen if I remained where I was.