ON MEANING
A Simple Contemplation
I have included the written essay and my reading of it.
Please let me know what you think.
MEANING
There is a simple definition:
Meaning is“the action or process of defining something”.
It sounds so simple.
Meaning: searching a rationalisation for seeming helpless
in the face of horror
in Palestine, in Ukraine and in the other 120 conflicts
currently extent around the world*.
Searching an explanation/rationalisation about one’s life.
Searching a definition for one’s inconsistency of goodness.
When I help someone or some cause or some charity
I say I i wish to ease their lives,
I believe I care for them
simply because they are a fellow species member,
and I believe I want the best for them.
I MEAN I hold as values:
democracy, equality, justice, peace, and equal opportunity for all,
I MEAN I insist on fairness in all things cultural, political and financial things
for all species members.
But as I recently listened to young adults speak of their lives,
what I heard between the lines of confusion and quiet desperation
was a search for values, for a better way of living life,
for meaning;
and when I sat with some people of my own age
listening to memories, hopes, trials and loses
I heard between the lines of confusion and some desperation
a search for meaning.
The meaning of meaning is fraught with angst,
coils round our reasons to exist,
is a dialogue alone or desperate in a universe without one’s gods.
Even as meaning is fraught,
it is an honest search for understanding our humanity,
and all to often a conflict with the immorality of the barbaric rich
and their political and media partners
with their corrupting influences on our lives,
those who would reduce our world to material consumption
and to their violence and cruelty,
and even as many of us search for the meaning of meaning,
perhaps for our own true humanity
we none the less allowed the barbarians into the castle.
But I have salvation.
When I say the name of my wife,
when i think of her
when i imagine seeing her,
I MEAN i love her and I love to love her,
as her being embodies my love
and the existence of that love is a balm for much else.
I am certain of this for all my young and elderly friend
that meaning exists in love, kindness and caring.
NOTE
* There are 120 armed conflicts happening in the world today. These conflicts involve a wide range of actors, including over 60 states and 120 non-state armed groups. The majority of these conflicts are of a non-international character.
This week, behind the paywall is part 11 of
*TRANSFORMATION TO THE NEXT SYSTEM
A PROCESS DEPENDENT ON CREATING AND WINNING CULTURAL STRUGGLES
and the story of THIS WEEK’S PHOTOGRAPH
The then mayor of Bridport was challenged by the man on the left of frame over some political issue during an event to celebrate the new mayor. I was standing nearby and sensed something was about to happen. As it turned out the mayor swung round and verbally rebuffed the man. This is about what Henri-Cartier Bresson referred to as the Decisive Moment - watching, sensing, being ready with exposure and focus to respond immediately, releasing the shutter at the key moment, either before nor after. This is what separates the photograph from being a generalisation to being an incisive observation of what it is to be human.
TRANSFORMATION TO THE NEXT SYSTEM
A PROCESS DEPENDENT ON CREATING AND WINNING CULTURAL STRUGGLES
by Robert Golden
11. FINDING A STRAIGHTFORWARD WAY TO COMMUNICATE
Since the development of speech until humans left the hunt to settle and grow food, until joining together in villages and then in towns to increase productivity through the division of labour into specialty production, (making bread, candles, beer, dying cloth, etc.) traveling the long journey via the rise of industrialisation to the rise of the Neoliberal agenda, people’s cultures have been rooted in the practical day-by-day routines of survival, impregnated by belief systems based in the fear of death and the simplistic answers imposed upon them by the ruling elites and their priest casts.
In the age of mass media this has led to the belief that ‘common sense’ is good guide to reasonable choice-making. John Berger described common sense as ‘a homemade ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.’
This shows that Transformation will require that those who wish for and believe in change will have to concentrate not only on the goals and ideas for next systems but with equal energy on developing a new ‘normal’, an emotionally fulfilling open culture that can capture, moment by moment, the imaginations of the multitude.
The Transformers will have to be as clever as Obama’s use of “Yes we can” and Trump’s use of language to touch the nerve endings of the dispossessed (without the lies, racism, misogyny etc.)
Next week : 12 A PROVOCATION - demanding those in power to serve us