“My whole world’s in an uproar, my whole world’s upside down
Don’t know what I’m doin’ here, but I’m always hangin’ around
And that’s another side to this life, I’ve been leading
And that’s another side to this life.”
–from Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “The Other Side of This Life”, written by Fred Neil in the mid-1960s
It’s in a clearing up ahead,
the top of the hill
and sea-town far below
the ocean wide and vista-ed.
They’re up ahead,
all of them,
those you miss and still love
waiting there for you
parents, old friends,
even dogs.
They’ve all chosen to wait
as it turns out,
knowing you were
coming today.
The tall ship in the harbor
unfurls its sails as a warm wind
catches them to take you
and the others home at last
to the soft pink-blue
skies westward.
It is only on the voyage
though, that you realize
you were always meant
for this one last passage
of abiding peace.
It’s in the clearing up ahead,
the brow of a hill
and that seaside town below.
And a tall ship waiting
just for you, the last traveller
of an oh-so predictive life.
We’ve seen it all of late in the West. Now a 7-year-old brutally beating up her helpless infant baby brother and some grade 1ers planning to poison a classmate.
Hence, the relevance of Lord of the Flies and The Bad Seed. There seems no limit to how ready some (too many) young children–male or female–are to kill or to use violence against others. And no gender is better than another when it comes to nastiness, meanness, cruelty, and evil.
Life used to be simpler. especially for 5, 10, 15, and 20-year-olds before 2010 thereabouts. When confronted with a questionnaire or survey, a person was given two choices for gender: Male or Female. Now a local transit survey offers the following choices in addition to male and female: Transgender FTM, Transgender MTF, Two-Spirit, and Prefer Not to Say (which is an obvious safe choice for anyone in these highly-politicized/agenda-ed times daze).
BTW/I’m not sure what a Two-Spirit person is and how come the majority of the world has never likely heard of such before this survey.
And in any case, what do FTM, MTF, and Two-Spirit have to do with riding public transit? Or for that matter gender, period. You either ride the transit to get to places or not, irrespective of your gender, race, religion, and whatever potentially-distracting, politically-divisive categories one might care to throw out to others. It seems to me that the transit authority is unnecessarily making use of transit a political issue on gender lines.
Our country has gone way, way overboard on political correctness–the result being that people live in fear, absurd touchiness, and societal-induced paranoia. One can’t say or do a thing without stepping on somebody else’s toes and getting hauled into a human rights commission hearing in which the complainer automatically gets legal support (!).
Likewise, the mass politicization via myriad agendas with one’s pet agenda automatically being superior to everyone else’s agendas or rights, brooking no denials and serving lawsuits to anyone else who does not acquiesce or salute one person’s or group’s narrow-minded flag.
Our society has lost all sense of perspective, reciprocal fairness, and sanity when it comes to this stuff. A major mass deconstruction of sanity at that.
The prevailing public discourse of the day has been mainly reduced to bitching, complaining, or flaming, and with that has occurred a subsequent loss of civility, abandonment of any kind of common sense, and zero sense of contextual perspective.
Pity the kids who are raised in such an unnecessarily stressful, anxious, confusing, toxic atmosphere and time. I am not sure what of they will learn from such divisive, confusing core values in an age of advanced soulless technology and human slavery to the machine like never before. Where will they get the old, unambiguous, warm messages about ‘brotherhood’ and love that once gave the Western world so much hope, inspiration, and obvious idealism? And whatever happened to “the human race”, oneness, unity, world peace, and the Global village?
In their places, we only have the wrong-headed, crazy substitute of mass politicization of everything on everyone, and the self-righteous tyranny of political correctness used for agenda purposes imposed arbitrarily and relentlessly on the Canadian people. A deeply deconstructive ‘holier-than-thou’ war within. Yes, in Canada, indeed–as the cartoon character Pogo once so famously said–“We have met the enemy and he is us”.
It sure is.
smaller, specific details————————————larger, general contexts
On the imaginary continuum above, there are specific, separate details which have their own merit, especially in helping us to perceive and know more carefully and fully. God can be in the details, as can beauty, truth, understanding, depth, and appreciation.
Though, by themselves, they often suggest other possibilities, truths, meanings, and significance once they are responded to and creatively understood in terms of other known information, other details, situations, and contexts of varying kinds.
The other end of the continuum would be context and it is this that helps us to make sense of our experiences, our impressions, our responses, ourselves, others, situations, and the myriad details encountered in life. As Updike writes in the last stanza of “My Mother at Her Desk”, his mother, was somewhat limited in perspective because she was more/too focused on details:
But above a book,/she’d lift her still young face and say, “Such ugly words!”/ as if each stood alone.
He responds thus:
No, no, I thought,/context is all.
And he is absolutely right. For instance, if a fridge conks out, one has to notice the detail that it is defunct. But the importance of the detail arises when one understands what this defunctness means on a short-term or long-term basis. (i.e., Milk products will sour, drinks will be warm, ice will melt, etc.)
Specific details without a person’s perception, understanding, and consciousness dead-end and mean little, which is why one sometimes hears people saying “I don’t know what to do” amid a zillion possibilities and choices. Similarly, for instance, the many beautiful details of a garden or a painting can be limited to superficial, surface impressions and fast, ready dismissals in this so-hurry-up, quickly distracted age.
But if one really pays attention to details and extends one’s perceptions–perhaps accompanied by/with empathy, imagination, and creative processing, then something larger–a context–begins to emerge and suggest itself. In fact, many people are simply and commonly limited to surface impressions, never going beyond the immediate details of passing moments. They largely don’t know themselves and others simply because they don’t extrapolate from, connect, or reflect on the details, putting them in contexts for larger understanding, never mind appreciation.
Consciousness requires putting the details of one’s life experience and observations into context. In that way, one’s knowledge and self truly begin to grow. One becomes ‘larger’ and is more aware (i.e., not ‘sleeping’), forming more focused opinions on what is important, relevant, meaningful, or not.
In any case, we all live in different contexts consisting of many life details. These contexts make up our lives and who we are. They, in turn, can be many or few, larger or smaller depending on our learning, opportunities, and attitudes.
For example, if someone wanted to get closer to me or understand me, he/she’d have to understand the particular contexts of my childhood, my educational path, my working career, and the values and beliefs which contextualize my choices and behaviours within moments and situations today. (This blog offers much of that sort of information, incidentally.) Otherwise, others would be scratching the surface of my actual life with mere exterior details that limit any depth of understanding and appreciation.
Context is all; it is everything–making up our life-stories, past, present, and future. No one decision, no matter how limited or limiting, is ever made without a known, intuited, or ignored context. There are possibilities implicit within details, and these imply or reflect contexts, real or imagined.
A life, then, is made up of contexts even if a person never fully sees or understands them, even if the person is mired in or limited by the specific details of that person’s life. There is always a ‘forest’ beyond ‘the trees’. There are unlimited patterns, contexts, and mysteries which open up to reflective, conscious minds. In particular, it is, always, in those patterns and contexts that one will find one’s true and deeper self as well as personal meanings and life significance.
………………………………….
Etc.
This concept of details and context can also be understood in terms of say, reading a novel. We immerse ourselves in the details of plot and the unfolding context of the main character, responding to his or her experiences and observations. What we ‘take away’ from the book is dependent, always, on our ability to contextualize the details of the characters’ lives, and to apply these to our own lives, minimally reflecting on how character contexts reflect our own life contexts and story.
Again, if we hope to learn, to grow, and to progress in some way/s, we need to make connections, perceive themes or larger patterns of contexts, and inevitably contextualize. Otherwise, we are limited to/by many disparate, disconnected, disjointed details or the most baseline/basic information and impressions.
Context=”The Big Picture” or Big Picture Consciousness
Etc. 2 Speaking as a former English teacher, I would add that that was one of the most satisfying concepts to teach relative to writing. Namely, that the specific words of a sentence had to fit the context of that sentence–which helped in finding the right or an appropriate word; that every specific sentence needed to contribute to or add to the context of a paragraph’s topic sentence, and–larger still–the context of the composition’s thesis or main purpose/focus.
Similarly, relative to literary analysis, specific details of an interpretation or reading needs to take in all of the specifics of a work we are given by an author. Only in that way can we arrive at a reasonable, plausible interpretation (called in my time ‘a close reading’ as opposed to a ‘closed reading’), understanding, and appreciation of the work. Again, in the above two examples, the specific details inevitably lead to or clarify the larger contexts, meanings, purpose, and significance.
(previously published here June 29, 2014)
Him: “Mommy, what’s 8 plus 5?”
Mother: “You can add it up on your fingers.”
Him: “But I don’t have 13 fingers.”
(left/greenish-yellow: female; right/reddish: male)
(These guys and the rest of their flock showed up a couple of months ago and are still regulars at the bird feeder in the backyard. Big fans of black-shell sunflower seeds.)
A typical Alberta man knows far more about and is closer to his truck than to his wife.
Ellen Goodman–a fine newspaper columnist of old who wrote a piece on being alive at the age Mozart was dead already–which provided a lot of perspective re. making hay while the sun shines, and
poet Jane Kenyon whose poem “Otherwise” guides my life daily, knowing that whatever I am doing or have plans to do on a given day could have been, might have been, and will definitely be “otherwise” some day with a great deal of fact and certitude.
These two views have been long-standing ‘wake-up calls’ to not waste a minute of precious time-limited life and to fully appreciate whatever pleasure, enjoyment, beauty, etc. I receive or am able to bestow on others.
the Experienced Real as opposed to whatever Personal Dreams and Imagined Desires
