‘A Blog Oasis’ is not designed to be instructive. Rather its thoughts are meant as aids to your own cogitation or rumination or meditation. They are there to be read and pondered – absorbed or not, according to what such pondering advises you. I chose them because they have all, in their own ways, helped me, particularly when (as I frequently do) I find myself wondering about whether I am making the most of myself, whether I am living the life I would like to live.
No-one in the history of man has ever, I suspect, been able to do that entirely, and I write for those, like me, who are still searching and exploring. Those who have already found have scant need of most literature, and none at all of mine. If you are still searching, though, just maybe, some of these words may help in your quest.
The comments I have written to accompany the quotes are not invariably analyses of them. Often they are divergent thoughts spawned by the original. I have revised my words since I wrote them for Lyubov, but they remain true to the spirit of the original.
I wrote ‘A Blog Oasis’ for a daughter. To avoid using the cumbersome, and tiresome, ‘he or she’, I therefore tended to use feminine pronouns.
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Week 1:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Shakespeare, William, ‘Hamlet’, I, 3.
There seems to be a peculiar belief abroad that all we need to do with life’s axioms is to know of them; that, if we do, it must follow that we live by them. As if knowledge of a diet will, by itself, help us to shed weight.
Spiritual axioms are phrases that are capable of enhancing the quality of life. Mostly the goals they describe are unattainable and their value exists not in living by them but in trying to live by them.
They are, however, certainly not goals which are there for the thinking of them. They are skills. And like any skill they require practise and a certain amount of application. Both the joy and the value of most skills are in the journey and not the destination.
Of nothing is this more true than in this, possibly the greatest piece of advice ever given by a father to his offspring: ‘to thine own self be true’.
It may only be a phrase of six words, but it contains a lifetime’s worth of struggle.
For one thing, one’s ‘own self’ is not a constant. Just as my body changes over time so do my brain, my soul, my beliefs – everything. So being true to myself requires of me not the speed of a downhill skier but the agility and awareness of the slalom skier.
But it is, my darling, a wonderfully useful yardstick. And, when I brush my teeth at night, though I can use it as a scourge for those occasions when I wasn’t true to myself, this enjoinment is more useful as a bouquet: It enables me to cheer myself – especially on those occasions when (as it usually does) it has taken courage to be true to myself.
However miserable the rest of the day, if I can go to bed with that to cheer about, that day will eventually have been sealed as being a good day.
Let us make a commitment, you and I, that today we will recognise that we are worth being true to, and that we owe it to our worthy selves to be true to them.
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I have been accused of writing from a higher moral plain, or considering that I do. I really don’t believe that to be true.
I write because I wrong.
And I wrong because I’m human. This is not original sin, but original fallibility. There has never been a person born without such fallibility, nor will there ever be one. If we were sensible, we would recognise that as being one of the very many things which unites us all.
I write because I continue to wrong.
And because there is that within me capable of grievous wrong.
I write because it’s always seemed to me that, if I suffered from eczema, the consultant I would want to see would be a dermatologist who shared my complaint, rather than one blessed with a baby’s-bottom complexion.
I would love to be able to claim that I have meditated my way into spiritual enlightenment, or that God whispers to me why His mysteries are so mysterious. But I haven’t and He doesn’t. I do spend a lot of time in thought and reflection. But I fear more of this is day-dreaming than concrete cogitation.
I write because I have wronged.
In microcosm I have made a fair amount of the mistakes of which man is capable, and have committed most of the sins, vices and peccadilloes that are on offer – occasionally (it must be said) very enjoyably!
I write because I continue to wrong.
I’m no poacher turned gamekeeper, I’m merely a poacher who’s studied quite a lot about game-keeping, who am in awe of certain gamekeepers (and utterly appalled by others!), and who keeps thinking that game-keeping is really such a good idea that one day I really should give it a whirl. If only life wouldn’t keep on intervening!
I keep wondering when I will finally be old enough to learn from my mistakes; and am now old enough to know that I probably never will.
Far from claiming any kind of high-ground, therefore, I accept that I write from a position deep in a chasm. I do stand in judgement. But it often ill behoves me when I do so.
I write because I am capable of grievous wrong.
I do have to stand in judgement of the likes of Mr Bush and Mr Blair. I try to remember Gandhi’s enjoinment to hate the crime but love the criminal. And I accept that I know neither Mr Bush nor Mr Blair (nor do I have the slightest desire to do so) and am thus condemning the criminal from a position of ignorance. Sometimes, though, the crime has such enormous implications, one simply also has to condemn the criminal. If its acorn is poisonous the oak must be.
I feel I have to stand in judgement of these two men. I feel we all do. Because their actions have threatened, and continue to threaten far too many of the things for which they are demanding of others that they forfeit their lives: democracy, human rights, civil liberties, free speech and indeed the whole species and planet. And in a way which I am sure history will deem to have been considerably more dangerous than the threat posed by al-Qaeda. But I must also accept that, had I sought (and obtained!) such office, there is that within me quite as capable of abusing power as egregiously as these two men have done. I hope I might have stopped short of the excesses meted out by, let’s say, Mugabe or Amin or Cecescau or Pinochet. But, you know, in the right circumstances, I’m not even too sure about that.
And that’s why I so passionately believe in the concept of free speech and democracy: the world needs to be protected from people like the me I could be.
