Self analysis

One of the important things which retirement brings is the time to reflect. Not necessarily on ones own life but rather the successes or failures of humanity itself.
Of course mankind is a work in progress and what we do in the next 50 years will be crucial. But it's not into the future that I gaze but into the present and near past.
Human beings are born individualistic but often revert to pack animals and its this conflict, to think for ourselves as entities on our own right and not become one of a herd that mark us out for what I would value as successful in life.
Whether you define your success by the size of the television screen on your wall or your attempt to understand the complexity of the human personality within all of us, the one consumerist, the other the effort in trying to make sense of what life, (perhaps your own life) has meant in your bid to be inclusively successful.
One of the difficulties in assessing your ability to be inclusive is that it demands detachment. The need to stand back and be honest about those you know and, especially honest about yourself in your endeavour to create some sort of communication with people you meet along the way. Is it one sided, does it demand you loose a lot of yourself in forming some sort of halfway position towards the other person, creating in the process a falsity to please, or are you happy with the idea that you can't please them all.
I mentioned in my last blog Jeremy Corbyns life long struggle against nationalistic totalitarian ideas which sadly seem to be the flavour of the month as we seek a new identity having emerged from under the bureaucratic blanket which describes the European Union. His beliefs seem so out of step to the jingoistic sounds from across the dispatch box on the Tory side, he is accused of naivety by his own side in this bear pit of completing aims and yet he is a man of steel compared to them in his unwillingness to forsake his ideals.
There was a man in Judea who witnessed his own followers forsake him, one by one for the sake of self preservation but who of them, do we now remember ?
Humanity is as complex as the genetic rules which make us. We are around for such a short space of time in this life of ours that to cast around in the rubbish of our past to find points of direction which brought us to where we are, is no waste of time or the effort needed to embark on a journey of self discovery.