Thought Picnic: The other complements and compliments

The significant others

I have had two significant relationships amongst the many others altogether coming to just about 11 years. The first which was for love lasted 7 years, the second, some 6 years later was out of necessity for companionship.

In chatting to a friend just over a week ago, I reviewed elements of mine in relation to his. In his case, a one-time quite fervent partnership suddenly took an unfortunate turn that in terms affected most of us that knew them, maybe not as much as the parties involved but nonetheless it was quite unsettling.

A love unmade

Then there was one other in-between those two that was intense in its spark but never ignited a fire, it was one where my head was never engaged in the affairs of the heart that it brought much hurt and heartache, we made plans we never saw through, we made promises we never kept and in the end we parted company too long that when I thought to rekindle it, the kindling had gone – death had whisked my love away.

Somehow, that break-up of a relationship that barely existed over a span of 6 years of somewhat unrequited love affected me the most, I had to get well before I had the time to grieve and that took the best part of a year before I made peace with myself and my loss, but for the memories that could have been if we did work at it.

The foibles we suffer

That last relationship was as unequal as they come in background, means and status but it brought with it amazing insight, exposure to things I never before considered important and adventure that brought a smile every time.

We parted company in the pique of unnecessary jealousy, I might have been a tad insensitive but everything I did to convey assurances where the offence was more of the other than myself just seemed to accentuate a sense of lower self-esteem in the other – there wasn’t much we could do.

I have striven to keep the friendship of all those I have met, but it is their prerogative to withdraw their friendship if they so wish, I will not hold it against them – life is just too short to live it in grudge.

Just like that

A year after that break-up, the friendship was rekindled, not for a relationship but just for that good company we once had and it came in very useful when in my greatest time of need, there was help, there was company and there was presence.

However, one evening without notice, the door slammed and it was 8 months before we saw each other again, people can only be what they want to be. I am not perfect and though I have lived a good deal of my life a single man, the much I have learnt about relationships, the need for them and the lack of need for them leaves me with the conviction that they are needed and needed so much.

Definitely maybe

There will be a time when the stories of each relationship will be told in the detail that each deserves from the fleeting to the involved, the ones that connected and the others that brought me to people I will rather not be in company of, all ensconced in my memory where every time we’ve said goodbye I have either died a little or lived a little more.

In the midst of learning much of what I do not want in the next relationship that the list has literally obliterated what I should need in a relationship, the bigger lesson of relationships and companionships that matters to all social beings and has been studied in primates that it got me even more concerned about my singleness is – all good companionships have a complementing and complimenting effect that you can never create for yourself out of singular means or access.

Therein comes my desire to cultivate something new, the reality is, it is not you might think, even I should be allowed an element of mystique whilst matchmakers can keep their matches in the matchbox, I know the kind of fires I want to light. Thank you.

Thought Picnic: Seeing like our spirit does

Wealth in knowing

Discovering the wealth we possess is sometimes the most difficult knowledge to come about in the lifelong quest of knowing oneself.

Even those who appear to be so self-assured and self-confident to the point of being self-conceited bordering of nauseating arrogance may just be wearing a mask of extraversion that is hardly emblematic of who they really are or should be portraying of themselves.

Wealth is not just money in the bank even though it matters, however it should matter because it allows one to stretch and reach rather than just hoard for some fear of poverty suddenly mowing down our ramparts and laying us bare. We are blessed to be a blessing for an open hand is a hand that is open to receive.

Driven to succeed

The greatest wealth however is insight, knowledge that fuels expectation, that undergirds hopes and fills you with the kind of purposeful resolve that where you are at is transient and the journey ahead, adventurous and fraught as it might be, leads to a destination that will make it all worthwhile.

It is what gives joy to living well and strengthens the will to latch on to the affirmative in the midst of the negative and the uncomfortable, it drives you through that valley of the shadow of death assured of the fact that you will not faint but arrive at the summit to bask in the light of being an overcomer.

The amazing spirit in us

Time and again, I see people draw strength from deep within to do things that look like the miraculous, all because they believed and believed themselves enough to dare.

Fighting adversity with a tenacity that tells a thrilling story that sometimes never gets told, the spirit of man is amazing to behold, it takes him to places his senses are yet to fathom or his mind is yet to fully comprehend, but like the engine of a vehicle; take the breaks off, put it in gear and depress the accelerator – and where you are becomes where you were as where you want to be gets to become where you’ll eventually be.

In difficulty, we once again find the simplicity to completely understand things so easily.

Thought Picnic: In difficulty find simplicity

Stranger in strange places

Hostile environments are not places where he feels comfortable especially when  more the stranger dependent on the friendliness of others around you.

Though it might not appear as if they are being hostile, the subtlety between willingness and unwillingness, responsiveness and indifference, needing but hardly giving or even hearing but not listening makes him think he is an interloper upsetting some equilibrium or norm.

Now, he should not take these things to heart, his natural disposition is still to be calm, gentle, considerate, understanding and engaging, it is necessary that this helps keep perspective.

Dialling back the scales

The first few weeks can be difficult, finding his feet along with the privations of company, comfort and the essential nutrition that he should by means pay attention to, it is unsafe to do without, yet he beds most nights without supper where that critically helps the medicine go down but the means are scarce as other priorities matter.

He did seek help, some came but not really enough that the stealth of worry is just about to become a rather itchy pillowcase, no antihistamines for a bed so uncomfortable – beware of the baggage of lack.

It is a matter of days, he comforts himself things will soon turn and if he does not fret, it might well be good for the figure; an unspoken resolution has used the conspiracy of circumstance to deliver a trimmer Adonis – many hunger for that, out of hunger or in hunger.

In every difficulty, he tries to find some simplicity.

Thought Picnic: The many umbilical cords to cut

Cutting the cord means survival

The first umbilical cord by nature and for the preservation of life needs to be cut at birth; it is the time when the newly born baby has to begin a life of reflexive independence to breathe on its own and to take in food usually in form of milk to thrive.

However, that umbilical cord is the easiest to cut, there are many more that bind us to our parents or guardians, our communities, our societies, our beliefs and much else which should when the fullness of time is come be cut or the birthed will suffer a form of death – a death of freedom, a death of expression, a death of happiness, a death of ambition, a death of hope – too many deaths whilst still alive and it might breed resentment, despair, rebellion or depression – it mimics the cycle of life.

The point in time

At the point when a baby stops being a foetus, that umbilical cord is cut; just as when a child stops being a baby, when an adolescent stops being a child or when an adult stops being an adolescent – that is would be the ideal path of growing up but it is rarely the case.

The responsibility relationship between guardian and ward is dynamic, between them the cutting of the umbilical cord is a function of age, individuality, expression, responsibility and sometimes success which could determine the leeway one will give the other to be better at what they are on the way to becoming.

The last cut

The most difficult umbilical cord to cut is that where the guardian has to accept that their ward has come of age, where the parent appreciates their child has become an adult and should be given the opportunity to learn their own lessons, live their own lives and chart their own courses.

Obviously, guidance and advice is useful but instruction and diktat is unhelpful; the atmosphere in which the child has been schooled in the home will however become the foundation of the confidence, the self-esteem, the determination and the drive that child has like it did when it ventured its first breath at birth and performed the first suckling reflex to take in food.

Taking places

At a point in time, the parent or guardian will have to be put in their place, not so much to be put down but to be respectfully made to understand that certain decisions are now out of their hands and their influence is at best advisory and nothing more.

Along the line, between agreement and conflict whilst growing up we also encounter the more difficult elements of gaining our individuality. Expectations are high, criticisms are rife and praise is rare, punishment is severe sometimes to the point of brutalisation and power is wielded with deathly omnipotence that it feels easier to walk through prison walls than extricate oneself from parental overreach.

Parents do overreach and in the process attempt to blackmail their children thinking their parental responsibility required of them by society to provide the basics of protection, food, shelter, clothing, education and good example is the fullest expression of love without accounting for the deeper emotional needs of the child which will never be met with things.

Tough love facts

We did not ask to be born, but we have been born and there should be more times in our lives that we are grateful to have been born, to have the parents we have had and to have had the care and affection that they have showered on us from when we were hopefully bundles of joy at birth through when they patiently tolerated with exasperation their inability to control the child who is still under their roofs.

However, we return to the matter of umbilical cords or in other parlance apron strings. Children are not clones they are unique personalities moulded by the environments in which they grow, interact, find safety, experience abuse, feel love, witness hate, find acceptance and know rejection – we are moulds of situation and circumstance that are subject to the casts provided by those whose responsibilities we were in our formative years.

The path to acceptance

The healthiest relationships between parent and child will only find fulfilment when they all channel the Kübler-Ross model, which first studied the five stages of grief.

Denial comes with the guardian not believing that the child has come of age, there is anger that the child is not conforming to expected norms, there is bargaining as to how to regain the best control and influence over the child, then depression coming with unfulfilled promise or sadness that a situation might have become a lost cause and then finally, acceptance – accepting who the child has become; an adult with their lives, their goals, their purpose and their own decisions.

The point of acceptance is when the parent begins to respect that child and honour that child with guidance and advice rather than instruction, coercion and blackmail – the healthiest relationships will bring better communication, deeper interaction, more happiness and a glad heart for that parent as they approach their waning years.

It’s you or them

If the parent will not wise up to that necessity, then the child will at a certain point in time have to be respectfully forthright, frank, direct, honest and true – they will eventually have to find words to say, “I want to be able to live my live as a person, unique, independent, fulfilled and appreciative of you out of recognition of who you have been in my life.”

Acceptance or frank expression on the side of the either the guardian or the ward is that umbilical cord cut for the relationship to thrive. If you have not cut it yet, consider how better things can be if that realisation first dawns on you and then you make them see the light.

Thought Picnic: The molds of bureaucracy

A mold

Bureaucracies are a strange life form, a system of well laid out processes that never seem to engage clockwork efficiency of alacrity or urgency.

Like mold, it takes away fervency or freshness leaving a footprint of lethargy, inertia and boredom as time ticks away as if it has no function of measurement than an abyss of nothingness clawing in darkness.

Those who people it

Yet, agents and agencies desire the omnipresence of bureaucracy to ensure that those who depend on it are introduced to the fact that they are powerful, they have responsibilities and they move on a whim except when coerced from above to do what could have been done long before without fuss.

Yet, we wait, almost helpless, almost hopeless and almost listless that a time will come when bureaucracy moving as it might be at a speed that makes drying paint look instantaneous, bureaucracy will finally respond to why it was put in place to fulfil all righteousness and to give the needlessly engaged a sense of purpose.

Complicate the simple with ease

You have to ask why what is seemingly easy to do is made unnecessarily complicated, inscrutable and impossible to action immediately, if not for each little person in the bureaucratic workflow to engage in the power-play of self-importance to the detriment of the organisation at large.

Nowhere was it self-evident than when I visited two banks to open accounts. In the first, I had to book an appointment for the next day, go through tens of questions, sign forms to the point that my fingers bled ink into the cuneiform of my signature and yet will wait days to be able to access the account for business.

The second just required a walk-in on a Saturday afternoon, I was seeing an advisor in 10 minutes and within 30 minutes, I had a bank card and my account was live for transactions, just like that.

It goes without saying that there is probably a century of history between the first and the second bank which is nimble, modern and streamlined to eliminate the encumbrance of bureaucratic time-wasting pretending to back-office operations.

Times change but not for that

What seems well-oiled to whoever set up that system does not really fit into the generally instantaneous gratification that we all have acquired through the shortness of attention spans that has become our way of life by reason of competition for our skill and subservience to some greater or lesser cause.

There might be use for mold as there is use for bureaucracy if you are part of it rather than depending on it.

One learns patience before aggravation, calm before disquiet and acquiescence before complaint when faced with immotile bureaucracy, we are forced to find the kind of inducement that will set a bureaucracy off like an avalanche towards the solution – by which time, a lesson is learnt, no improvements are made and the next person down the line succumbs to the throes of that wonderfully tortuous wringer called bureaucracy – it is just the way we have always done things, you are told.

Opinion: Finding Against The Gospel of NOT - That EHRC Judgement

The rise of religious politics

Each time I think about the ministry of Jesus Christ when he trod the lands of Judea and Samaria as depicted in the gospels I am at times wont to channel Mahatma Gandhi when he was purported to say, “I like your Christ but dislike your Christians.”

Over the last few decades or so, a brand of this religion has emerged which looks very much like modern-day expressions of other Abrahamic faiths, political Judaism with its cauldron in Israel has held the world to ransom with Gentile guilt for the Holocaust and other pogroms that go back centuries, political Islam first expressed in Saudi Arabia, then radicalised in Iran before it was hijacked to be become a potent terrorist movement once spearheaded that the Al Qaeda crusade and political Christianity.

This, I dare say is more widespread and finds expression in social issues that polarise, attempt to ostracise and in terms can be quite discriminatory in a world that is tending more towards secularity than the Dark Ages of moralising sententiousness.

The Christian right and wrongs

In America, it started with the abortion wars, then the issue of homosexuality, gay marriage and stem cell research. God or at least the Christian God is inserted into every debate of the right to have slaves then to prayer, to bear arms, to limit opportunity where a majority of Americans are not by any stretch of the imagination native to the land they have colonised corralling the Native Americans into reservations with money-making casinos and attendant mental issues.

In Africa, they have not rallied round the cross Jesus so succinctly said they should bear and follow him but around an obsession with homosexuality as observed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a gullible flock of bees feasting on the narcotic pollen of the prosperity gospel.

The activist Christian

In Europe, homosexuality and gay marriage and aggression secularism taking hold in our societies have become the gospel of Not as preached by the Holy Padre in the Vatican, who without much distraction cannot have been oblivious of the clergy who have said mass in the name of the Catholic Church whilst satisfying their lascivious tendencies with the innocence of the small – much prosecuted for redress and justice in North America and Europe but no one has lifted the lid on possible heinous deeds in Africa, Latin America or Asia.

The issue of women having titular roles in the Anglican Church is as engaging as it is disheartening much as gay marriage, abortion issues, reverse missionary journeys – where Africans are coming to Europe to open churches along with pervasive issues of financial impropriety or excess – our televisions have become the means of intruding on our lives without necessarily affecting our lives.

It isn’t Christians in the love for humanity

The most compassionate of our humanity campaigning against grinding poverty, debilitating disease, bad governance or war are hardly religious, they are pop stars and billionaires who openly shame the many followers who have long departed from the ideals of the founders of their systems of faith and have become activists portraying a sense of being under siege from the world around them and being discriminated against.

That many have conflated persecution which comes from adherence to faith with discrimination which is borne of taking social positions against secular norms that allows for diverse strands of humanity to live in some semblance of communal bliss is most interesting and it is exemplified in symbols and beliefs that seek to discriminate and differentiate, ostracising those who in a secular setting have a right to service denied them by those paid in public service to be professional about their vocations.

The cross and the belief

Four Christians having exhausted all legal process in the UK when to Europe to seek redress and a judgement on the matter was pronounced on Tuesday.

Two of them were challenging the decision of their employers to exclude and sanction them for wearing crosses and the other two working for social service organisations put their beliefs before the interests of people who presumably have lifestyles they disagree with.

I am glad that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) proffered arguments that came out in support of one and against the other three.

Christian identity most morose

On the matter of wearing a cross, whilst it might well be symbolic of Christian faith, it is not mandated as an expression by law or doctrine that practitioners of the faith should wear a cross to portray what some have called a Christian identity.

Christian identity in my view is political-speak and if what that means is wearing jewellery moulded as a cross and a representation of the amazing gospel of the man that walked the roads of Judea and Galilee two millennia ago, then we are much poorer for what it really represents apart from the fact that it has patently lost its power to affect people’s lives.

Christianity is supposed to be a light and lamp, a light to gain perspective of beauty and a lamp to show the path when one walks in the dark. That same light when shone brightly into the eye for all the goodness and pleasure it bring to sight and vision, risks blinding the person – In other words, it should never be in-your-face whilst at the same time efficacious.

Reasonableness always wins

I can very when agree that it is reasonable to wear a cross in the workplace as long as there are no requirements for sterility in a controlled environment like a hospital. It would be trite to bring up the matter of whether cross wearers do sterilise their crosses and that is beside the point that there are many who wear crosses that are hardly Christian in belief or in practice.

In the case of the other two, one with professional duties of conducting marriages on behalf of the state and the other trained to provide relationship counselling, in a society comprised of diverse belief systems and governed by a compromise of secularity that seeks to get everyone to co-exist, it is antithetical to professional conduct to refuse to despatch services you paid to provide because of a sentiment.

Our secularity is paramount

The need to separate church and state cannot be more pertinent than to have individuals arrogate to themselves rights that conflict with community in order to prove a religious point – we do not live a theocracy and we do not believe the same.

It goes without saying that I am of the opinion that if such people intend to place their beliefs above secular co-existence, they should seek employment where only their beliefs are paramount.

The moment we engage with the public we become subject to the norms that promote societal cohesion as is necessary for the compromise of secularity we have adopted in our somewhat mature civilisations that confers the freedom to religion but not that right to use it to discriminate and contemn the lives of other members of our diverse humanity.

Where I stand

I take no positions on any of the matters I have raised apart from these reasonable views, we should protect our children from sexual exploitation and pursue to the ends of the earth anyone who have abused and violated children for any ends.

The matter of abortion should be between the woman, her doctor and her conscience, if health issues are of significance, then the law should support the safety of the female over the consequences for the unborn.

That the Israeli-Palestinian issue should be brought to a resolution that allows Israel to exist safely whilst restoring a greater sense of dignity to the Palestinians in their land with all that rightfully belongs to them.

To reason to all

That the separation of religion and state must be inviolable, Christians do not own the institution of marriage and whilst their beliefs are widespread their views cannot be allowed to denigrate the beliefs and lives of others – we need to reach an accommodation and that is mostly on the side of religionists than on the side of secularists.

I applaud the judgement of the ECHR, there was no discrimination in the case of the three that lost; they tried to assume victim status to excuse their unprofessional obstinacy that many including the judges saw through.

The Gospel of Not has lost against the fight to live and let live – long may it be so.

Thought Picnic: Composing elements of life and work

Counting down the sheep

I was up too early as I was trying to adjust my sleep patterns for the regularity of a work day. Getting to bed earlier and putting in more hours of sleep might mean I have to learn to count sheep better.

Some might say because I am in Wales, the matter of sheep is easy, but I will not subscribe to ridiculous stereotypes, I have not once seen a specimen of such since I arrived here.

Ironing smooth blogs

Between getting a blog up and the usual morning chores that had me ironing a shirt using a full-sized iron on a miniature ironing board, I could not help but wonder why irons do not have automatic sensors to determine the material being pressed and adjust the temperature accordingly.

Now, I know to turn the dial, but too many times the ironing surface needs high heat to attempt to rub off the material that had welded or should I say melted on the surface before you indelibly stain your cotton shirts.

Picture to see

My taxi to the office arrived 10 minutes early and by the time I was ready to leave, there wasn’t enough time for breakfast as I climbed in the cab for the 10 minute journey to work.

Greeted by soft rain, I arrived at reception and for my visitor’s pass I had to pose for a picture with no make-up on, then my hosts at the office had not yet arrived as I waited a while, catching up on my emails and other events on my tablet in the lobby.

Life comes up

Later the receptionist came to tell me that my host will soon be down to get me. Greetings, pleasantries and a visit to one of the offices presaged a meeting in the café for the mandatory morning coffee or was it a latte I had and it was nothing like Starbucks.

We had a general chat about things, where things were going and well about life, for whatever happens to us, either good or bad or somewhere in between comes under the broadest definition of life – that makes it easy to understand – questions get asked about my cane.

Then we went to meet other members of my team, 7 firm handshakes later, I began to make notes, read documentation and got my first access to the environment; the all-important wireless internet connectivity.

We are good to go, my first day has begun.