Age of Innocence

To live without contemplating the events and experiences we passed through, is like the walking dead, merely – of flesh, of breath, and of the soul. Life is just skin-deep and material. Failure to consider and contemplate on events and experiences, their consequences, effects, influences, their lessons, their offered insights, leads to a superficial appreciation of who we are in the bigger plan of things: the natural and humanly possible in contrast to the supernatural and humanly impossible. We become strangely ignorant of our own heart, our own being. We live, we exist, we move, but know not who we are, what we truly perceive and think in those events of our lives. They are not merely about our self, but about us, and our space – our relationships to those about us – in our generation, in the next and beyond. Meditation and contemplation are like windows of light that flood the depths of our conscious mind as blood flushes red our pallid flesh, beholding the Truth lying inert as in comatose, and in a moment awaken our sensibility to it. Reflection is like a helicopter, when on the ground sees the immediately visible trees and objects; as it rises it sees more such as monkeys in the trees, a track leading out of the woods, no longer just the trees perceived earlier. The higher it rises it sees the overall geography of water and physical terrain, the trees that had become a forest and now patches of green, the ‘communication’ of tracks and roads, a concept of the social and possibly economic milieu in the structure and density of dwellings. Events work with time and space to allow life to speak to us, in and through the issues, the outlook. Contemplation puts that collaboration to work. Someone once said that ‘life is not a little bundle of big things; it is a big bundle of little things’. This book is one about ‘little things’, of events rather than a continuous story, threaded together contiguously with the aid of chronology. Time is beautiful and yet not fully understood, a ‘sticky’ intelligent device of sorts, a fixed rigid scale – in what we can perceive and move in – on which man marks what enters upon his life against the time unit. Events come and go. Time faithfully and relentlessly marches on. As soon as a child is born, someone dies. Time … is life. As thy days, so thy strength … Time sets history in order, and gives it meaning. Time is certainty of the past. Yet history does not make the man, it is man who makes history. This book attempts to cast chronological events as a means to moderate a halting sense of my early life and times. This is a book about my growing up years from more or less age 3: the earliest I can remember of an event, up until age 12, the logical transition to another phase in my life. My early years were symbolic of movement, of change. One thing after another seemed to come on incessantly and life was always full of the present: embracing its offerings, hopeful ... every day I woke up to brand new frontiers of unexplored happenings, new vistas of enticing challenges, new hopes for the picking. They, like beautiful gifts from afar, must be unwrapped immediately and inspected with great expectancy. Something endlessly kept the spirits up, always up, always testing despite the physical and age limitations, amidst mostly brief experiences of anxiety, awe, humiliation, embarrassment, and trepidation. Unhappiness I knew not, as I did not understand happiness. I understood what was the present, the here, the now … today. There was not time for tomorrow until tomorrow comes along. All was just an experience, a passing one, much like an “aha” and then I am off to seek more. The agenda was a simple one: living the moment. That moment is not merely of an activity though seeming like passive idle ‘watching’, yet with lively observation, and active mental and emotional engagement. Long before the idea of this book, I sought to understand how the diverse events in the universe of my life served a purpose if ever there was one. We do not exist for the sake of existing. Endowed with a complete range of our senses we experience all that we have been through and will go through in life, not merely for an existential motive that repulses any logic of meaning and purpose. Today I know assuredly that life did not just happen. For me, time brings a convergence of all events that dovetail or integrate into the ultimate web of life – a blueprint of purpose and destiny – that I now see of their coherence. This book is not a product of creative writing. Each chapter carries a narrative report of an event from the eyes of a child. Children do not carry in their heads a continuous capture of life happenings like a running movie. Instead, they have a rich supply of short clips about events in their lives that may or may not be highly organised. Neither was the additional information presented, of the imagination, nor the outcomes, of invention. I have frequently played back these events, turned them over often enough in my consciousness to understand them, very unlike analysis. Reflection and meditative contemplation better describes my intent. I have often wondered how events silently and unobserved etched themselves into my personality and character. We have all been as clay in the invisible Potter’s hands and the Potter’s care and skill brings the clay to life, shaping every line and curve – all purposeful – to define us individually unique. Clay left to itself is just clay. In the events, I cannot claim to have any hand but I can be pliable for the Potter’s use. Reflection causes outward wonder – the awe of the Designer in His boundless space, one we are still seeking to reverently comprehend – therefore is pure and simple; analysis, on the other hand, imposes our limited experiences, confined prior knowledge with unexplained preferences, learnt prejudices, bred predispositions, and ungrounded opinions that intermeddle with an underlying inward self-centredness. Reflection had taught me to be grateful for all that came upon me – my birth into a great family of relationships, and the events that they enriched. They were all means for no personal selfish end in mind, no private agenda. Simply, they were valuable gifts to strengthen the heart to meet life in all its dimness, harshness, and seeming disparities, to render the heart tender where true relationships and feelings mattered over things and the pursuit of them. Reflection is like to commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still for in your bed, when all is quiet, you are alone free from activities that distract … you can talk only to yourself, to your own heart, truthfully. As looking in a mirror, you know what you see; as in your beating heart, what you hear; as in your resonating mind, what you think; and in contemplating, what you perceive and feel. No one else knows those secret conversations that are privy only to you and your Maker. Can you lie to yourself? Yes, you can; but you would know. Will you lie about yourself? There is no reason to, for you still would know. Deep reflection causes you to know, it is your conscience.