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FAR FROM AFAR
Saturday Nov. 14, 2015
Remarkable reminiscences. Always and forever. Watch for signs …
Collisions in life bring us closer. Distance and time may spread us, we can matter from afar, can’t we?
Several magical meetings this week – someone answered ‘what do you read?’ with ‘nothing’. Same day, memorable lunch with DT who excitedly informed me she’d ‘read everything Hemingway ever wrote’.
What contrast!
Great lunch …
I offered a suggestion to someone after a Toastmasters meeting. I’d been weary from a long day of deep thinking and from an emotionally draining speech I’d given. Still, he needed to hear what I had to say. If tables were turned, I would want that feedback. Glad I did. He told me nobody had ever made that suggestion to him before. Nice to have someone receiving and appreciating. Not because they need show appreciation, but because sometimes we don’t know if our little bits, our helping hands – are really helping at all, are really welcomed at all. That’s all.
Stringing together things that belong together seems like a marriage of great design with subtle resign – like these words that stuck with me all week. I interviewed PP on Monday; he said ‘you can’t manage afar from afar’ as explanation of why he travels so much in his work. I get it. The concept is not new, but that word set was new to me and stuck.
I offered words of encouragement to JJ. He called the next morning to offer his thanks. I had to quiz him about just what it was in our conversation that was the trigger for him, that he was calling about. It wasn’t any part of what I thought it was. It was something else, small to me, power for him.
I had several encounters this week which resonate in a similar way – something I said, something he or she said, resonated. My point, yes I have one …
My point is that we never know what it is we might say or do that will impact someone else. Sometimes they’ll call, sometimes they’ll write – but most often we’ll never know. That of course is a double edged blade. Just as many people will never connect with us to tell us how or why we gave them something of value, most of the ones who think we are idiotic won’t call either. Some will vote with their feet – we’ll never hear from them again. Most will be there, in the room or in the ether, still ready to receive what we have to share.
I would be remiss to not comment on yesterday’s terrorist carnage in Paris. ISIS is afar no longer, it has landed in our living rooms. In our morning headlines too. Media attention makes this so graphic, but fail to explain it. They are, of course, mostly covering it from afar …
I see a larger message ISIS are sending. Two events, about to happen in Paris – G20 summit and COP21 Climate Change Conference – bringing world leaders from afar, to Paris, in large numbers.
Seems ISIS understand politics and calendars in addition to fear, fear-mongering and how to insert their cause into decision makers’ minds.
Paris is still a place afar I would very much want to visit.
I’m in no rush …
Mark Kolke
written / published from Calgary, AB
morning walk: -1C/31F, a little breeze, overcast, thin gold ribbon of sunrise on my horizon, Gusta gobbled something from the tall grass (I couldn’t pry her jaws loose) and we enjoyed the quiet streets …
Reader feedback:
FEAR BEYOND BELIEF
Not that I’ve checked recently, but one thing I’m pretty confident about is we’re all going to die anyway. Bang on Mark! We all deal with the “what if’s” and I agree with the lack of logic in that. Deal with the things we have direct control over – everything else is just that – everything else. After we’re gone, all those worries and fears go with us. Did we solve anything, could we have spent that time and effort on something worthwhile? Did we instill those fears on others and perpetuate an illogical cycle? Not that I want to dwell on the morbid, as life is to be lived, but all of our personal memories, like our fears, die with us. The memories others have of us while we are here and how we treated them or others, and the legacy of that is where the magic of living life without fear continues in the land of the living!, RA, Calgary, AB ..P.S.: I'm really getting "into" my own insights these days and often wonder if I'd have the same ones if life had taken me in a different direction
Fear is an emotion like any other. It is part of our experience. We can choose how this experience affects us. There is a difference between feeling fear (a good thing that alerts us to hazard) and being afraid (which can become a paralyzing habitual state). Much the same as when my first sifu (Sifu in Chinese martial arts is master. In Japanese martial arts it would be Sensei) told me it was useful to Feel anger but it was useless to Be angry, BT, Calgary, AB
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