How to understand just one life.

 Subject: How to understand just one life.

Understanding anything is a marvel. Understanding hides under acres of misunderstanding and rests on many more acres of unploughed, unexplained conjecture. Our lives are buffeted by the winds of chance which, as in the game of ‘pitch and toss’, depend on a mixture of luck, inertia and an over simplified belief in our control of such events.  From birth to death we try to predict our passage by attempting to recognising its phrases, including the failures and end up hopefully celebrating some sort of progress.

 Progress it appears is the lightening rod by which our lives are written and by which we are judged. It’s the old measurement of double entry book keeping, debits and credits, without which, according to the bookkeeper, we amount to nothing. It’s always sad that we are often only remembered by the size of the house of the badge on the front of the car since these speak of other successes and not necessarily the things we actually value. Value, that great imponderable, so maligned by some as superfluous and by others as the only judgement worth noting. Blaze away on a roulette wheel hoping to win your way out of the conundrum or find and have explained just one nugget of information which might be important. Rather engineer your own answer than going along with the crowd accepting their interpretation of what life is all about.

Today in India my son Andrew travelled back into antiquity celebrating Saka Dawa, the the birth of Buddha, his enlightenment and his death. A moment in the calendar which  fuses time and establishes the change in mankind’s destiny. Festivals of devout believers take it upon themselves its celebrate   that  part of history which is relevant to to them.  A Buddhist celebrates, Saka Dawa or  Easter for a Christian used to be special but , for many in the UK, the relevance is now,  are the supermarkets open or not.

Each culture has its Dawa or celebratory  month, its exclamation  to what it feels is is relevant, since relevance is the mortar which holds society together and even if we are in a "society of one" you need some sort of paper trail to make sense of it all.

History can be a private thing since it’s ours individually which we reflect upon, not the ‘Big Bang Bosh’ of the history books but something much more seductive, an event or a series of events which only you can relate to and a few others find interesting.