Essentially the Only One

I recently received a private message from an excellent Opera blogger asking me to visit his blog more often.

This put me in a bit of a quandary; I was forced to admit to him that I visit very few blogs on a regular basis (and they know who they are), and a few more on a rather irregular basis, but ultimately I am not really a very good Opera socialiser!

Which is not to say that I don't greatly appreciate everyone's comments and visits to my blog - I do. But I devote most of my time to adding to my own entries here and very little to roaming the blogosphere. After this person's PM, I felt a bit guilty about my blogging social reticence but really that just the way I like to blog. I still regard this medium as more a personal diary than a form of networking and that's where my time goes.

Home after a long day. Changed twenty five cages in the mouse facility this afternoon (these are specialized cages fitted with wheels and electronic recording devices to measure running distance and speed). Not my favorite task but necessary.

So the day was eventful and full, yet all its detail is likely to be forgotten in a week or so. As is the fate of many other days.

Yet I can recall certain intervals, such as the one involving my photography of a lake by the Ontario town of Geraldton, in almost minute-by-minute detail. Time there followed a different course from that of today, even as its measure by the watch remains the same.

Perceptive differences such as this are the strongest evidence that my consciousness operates outside of time. And if it can operate outside of time, it can operate outside of any manifestation of physics in the real world, transcending everything including life and death.

I find the fact that the contemplation of lakeside is the absolute confirmation of a metaphysical, extra-corporal, existence to be profoundly satisfying.

(This photograph is the current desktop background on my laptop)

This is a photograph taken about 30 years ago when I was a student at Sussex University. I came across it today as I was reviewing some scans of aging prints that I made about five years ago.

It's a faded image of an undistinguished photograph taken with a cheap camera and developed without frills at the local chemist. Yet, looking at this photograph, I can recall, in considerable detail, the place, time, temperature, the wind, the feel of the sun, my mood and the thoughts that I was having when I took the picture.

These recollections are so old that they have a dreamlike quality to them. I took the photograph while walking alone around the hills that surround Sussex University at Falmer, England. It was getting on towards evening, on a warm, windy summer day. I was coming to the end of my time as a student, and the place was becoming precious to me as its impermanence became more pronounced. I may have even taken the photograph during the brief summer weeks I remained on campus after graduating.

I had no idea at all what I was going to do next with my life at this point. Not long after, I moved up to London to sublet a friend's flat and spent the rest of the year mostly unemployed with the exception of a job as an assistant mainframe computer operator for about six weeks that doubtless, had I remained in it, would have led to a radically different future than eventually transpired.

Getting back to the photograph, though. The dominant emotion of the time was fear. I was about to lose the grounding I had - and that was wobbly enough at college - and set out on something new. It led to a set of adventures but had no sense at all of the excitement of the adventurer. I would have been happier hiding under a blanket. Everything seemed so hard.

Considering I was only partially recovered from severe depression at the time, I am amazed that I functioned as well as I did in the end. I've been lucky in having a core or root of willpower that has moved me through the tough times. It's that rootedness, I sense, that allows me to revisit such times, be aware of what was, yet be perfectly content to be as I am today. It's amazing, really. Without it, I doubt if I could bear to think of those times at all.

I have lived in the United States for about 25 years. This seems like an extraordinarily long time looking at it as a whole, but because it has been divided into distinct episodes - my first marriage and my current, two very different jobs - purchasing agent/accounts manager and research biologist, and different houses even if in the same city, it rarely presents itself to me as that whole.

It's only when I consider it relation to my early years in England that I consider it as a block. That is easy to do considering my life there and my life here were and are very different. There's no doubt that moving to the U.S. was a good thing for me personally. It allowed me to grow and strike out on a path that was distinctly my own. At this stage of life, with family and a degree of financial security and retirement not too far off in the distance, I could say that I have 'made it', and on my own terms too. This is a lot to be thankful for.

However, something is lost. There is no doubt that the uncertainties that accompany the scrabble to establish yourself are two-pronged. Yes, there is a lot of anxiety but there is also a sense of energy and drive. You are very much alive. No time for complacency and little to prevent you from following a new and unknown path - a path that can be very exciting.

On balance, though, I prefer being where I am now. I hope that what could easily turn into complacency and smugness is instead reflective and enlightening. There are different challenges ahead. It will not be that long - although hopefully as long as possible - before my wife's and my parents reach the end of their lives. I will need to adjust to a whole new set of circumstances, and the reversal of the caring roles that still inform my outlook. My son will grow and in ten years time will mostly likely be gone from the house. These are major changes.

None of this was apparent to me as a boy dreaming of covered wagons on the prairie trails and an America that seemed almost mythical. Yet those boyhood dreams in large part led me to moving here. I have found out that much that I believed about America has been false, and much that I disbelieved has been true. You have to live here to understand this country. It is so different from the glossy projections of the American entertainment industry, yet it is not wholly different. Problems it has, but strengths too.

The first concept you shake from your mind is America as monolithic entity - it is not. It is called the United States for good reason, and although you can drive from one of the country to other and almost invariably find that familiar cluster of McDonalds and Burger Kings on the outskirts of town with their invarying menus, all you are seeing is the surface. Beneath there are massive regional differences, based on history, culture, ethnicity, even geography. Not as diverse as Europe, but not that much less. Not all that surprising, considering the European immigrant antecedents of this country, but surprising in that groups that might have been totally antagonistic on the European continent cooperate perfectly amicably in the U.S.

Perhaps being freed from the land that has been fought over for centuries allows the ancient antipathies to wane - at least that's what I think. Regardless, the harmonious integration of different cultures - an integration that has now spread to include Asian, African and South American people - amazes me (and I certainly acknowledge that there has been and still is some resistance). I think it is America's greatest strength and the single most important component that will sustain a maturing country that is becoming increasingly forced to acknowledge its global military, political and economic limits.

I was riding the bus between campuses on this bitterly cold January day, and my mind started wandering (as it often does), this time onto thoughts of this date - this year, that is, and this time exactly 100 years ago.

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