Loving to death is a hard choice to make

Something that caught my eye yesterday was new report about a 70-year old pensioner who was facing charges of killing his wife of 40 years, four days before Christmas.

I am sure many people have thought about 'doing away' with the spouses at one time or the other – in fact had all those who thought about it actually carried out their desires, there would probably be literally NO married couples celebrating their 4th anniversary.

If looks could kill...

Photo by Jacques Naude; Image from Mercury website

But I digress, as a rule most people who die in the hands of their partners probably do so in a fit of rage. Our man admitted in court that even though he was sad and despondent he was fully aware of what he was doing and could have stopped himself. A crime of passion this clearly was not.

The motivation of the pensioner was that of unmitigated devotion and utter helplessness at his inability to take care of his chronically ill wife, who had been bedridden for the better part of 14 years.

As things were, his wife had taken both chronically mentally and physically ill in 1994 and then in 1996 the man had taken early retirement from his job as the chief provincial traffic inspector to care for her full time.

Following is an excerpt from the Mercury newspaper that carried the story, on the fateful day that he took his wife's life:

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“On December 21, 2008, he gave her breakfast in bed as usual, and then helped her up. She fell down and he could not get her to the chair in the lounge.

“Realising that she could not walk at all and that he was too weak to even drag her, he called for an ambulance.

“Several calls later - including calls to his adult children - when the ambulance had not arrived, he got out his gun and shot her.”

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The man's police officer son testified that his father was fully dedicated to his mother but that he was under deep financial strains due to the high medical expenses associated with the treatment of pre-senile dementia. The financial strain was compounded further when his father lost his car and everything of value in a violent house robbery in 2000.

The courts sentenced the man to six years of imprisonment, suspended for five years, for the murder of his wife... and then set him free as a “victim of extreme circumstances,” stating that “imprisonment is not called for and would totally destroy the accused” because it was very unlikely that he would commit another crime.

Barely a day goes by the man admits that he is not shaken with remorse at what he had done. The day before his sentence was passed he was quoted in the Mercury that “this court cannot punish him anymore than he has punished himself. He has to live with what he did.”

It truly is a fine line between love and death. Circumstances as they were, perhaps the man's actions were justifiable but it could never have been easy.

Thankfully the majority of us will never have to be put to the test.

It's a useless mechanical existence sometimes...

I found this video clip on youtube that serves as a metaphor for some of my life experiences.

It's version two of the world's most useless machine. This version works to be one better (or worse) than the previous version, because not only does it do the incredibly inane by simply switching itself off every time you switch it on, but, do it too many times, it demonstrates its outrage and runs amok.

It reminds me of many people I have seen who hold the most ridiculous of jobs, surrounding themselves with all pomposity and self-importance, only to lose all that aura of decorum and superiority when their role is questioned once too often.

Reminds me of some of my school teachers... and certain political leaders. Click if you want a laugh!

It's never too late to touch dreams

It IS never too late to fulfil your dreams.

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A California couple made news last March for marrying after dating exclusively for 30 years. It might be strange in California to date exclusively for such long periods, but that is not why their union made the news. What was newsworthy was the the groom is 100 and the bride a fair 90.

It's an interesting story really. The couple met at a senior centre dance in the 1980s and “danced the night away and became an exclusive couple almost immediately.”

Both the bride and groom were married before and lost their respective spouses to death. The bride confessed that she had no intention of re-marrying, and her mind had not changed when she received the proposal.

Sweet woman that she was, she let him down lightly promising to marry him on his 100th birthday. Who'd have thought?

She remembered her promise as his 100th birthday approached. The site director of the Age Well Senior Centre in Dana Point, California spent almost an entire year organising the mid-March nuptials.

She even took his name.

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We all have unfulfilled dreams in our lives. Stories such as the one above should remind us that if some of our dreams are truly worth having, there probably is no real barrier to achieving them other than our own commitment to it.

Whether it's learning to play a musical instrument, getting on with a gym routine or even writing a book – if it's really that important to us we WILL have to find a way.

Personally I've had many 'could have' 'should have' moments that I look back at now and ponder how those lost opportunities could have altered my life. Honestly not all the lost opportunities might have made my life any better; granted it might have been very different but how can one assume it would be better – when 'better' is a relative concept.

Life is not worth living with regrets and pondering on 'could have's and 'should have's. We must either make a consolidated effort to do something towards attaining a dream, or resign that some dreams are simply not worth regrets over.

A Talatism would be that dreams are only depressants unless you work to meet them – so meet them so simply bid them farewell. Final equation is letting go – either of inhibitions or of regrets.

After all life is all too short to nurture regrets that we'll do nothing to address.

One step at a time to complete the journey

There is a Confucius saying that “the journey of a 1000 miles starts with the first step.” I think it was Confucius. Either way it was by anyhow someone who had a deep understanding of the fundamentals of the 'big picture' and a master in the art of dissecting the biggest of problems.

I have seen people so overwhelmed by the task at hand that they simply can't find the motivation to start. The latent fear that they might not have the energy to finish is so overpowering that it saps up the very belief that the job can be done at all.

A lot of people expend valuable energy (to say nothing of time) analysing the extent of the friction before they even begin to push. Problem is, that more often than not, the job at hand never really goes away. To to make matters worse, if we put a task off long enough we may find, much to our chagrin, that it has a tendency to grow in direct proportion to our diminishing energy reserves at the prospect. Often times a project fails to reach a successful conclusion not because the job cannot be done but simply because of failure to start.

In my experience, any such exercise is actually much like pushing a wheel on the slightest incline. While a lot of energy is initially required to overcome the friction between the wheel and the surface it is on, however, once the initial resistance is broken the wheel begins to take on a life and a momentum of its own and simply rolls to the next logical resting place.

Take any task piecemeal and it solves itself. Basically there are four logical resting places for any formidable job, and motivation required (phase 1 requires the highest level and then its relatively easier) only to get the ball rolling to the next immediate point: 1) the start, 2) the momentum build up, 3) the conclusion, and 4) the completion. Once sufficient momentum is built up by phase 2, any project almost concludes and completes itself, save for various incidental course corrections.

The trick is to look at each step as an end in itself; then each successful conclusion of a step can be treated as a subsequent foothold towards the final destination.

Even though what I have described seems elementary, I am always surprised how many people succumb to missing the forest for the tress. Progress measured against time is the motor – the trick is to pace the two for best affect.

Too much progress against too little time and the project might roll away from us and the point altogether missed, but too little progress against too much time and the project becomes a chore and the point never gotten. In either of the cases little is ever learnt and nothing is ever really accomplished.

'Speed' is important to keep the motivation high, but 'time' is important to ensure a good job, but most important of all, a 'start' is essential to get the job done.

A lot can be taken out of the statement above or the statement by Confucius, if one really looks into it and just reads the words for the simple proposition they make – the most obvious of which is that only way to see the end of a task is to start first.

Waiting for patience is hard to do

Patience is a virtue they say, especially in an age when the virtue is becoming more and more a rarity. Most people would be more than happy to demonstrate some patience if they just did not have to wait.

In an world with instant coffee, instant milk, instant entertainment (in the form of television), etc we have become accustomed to instant light (and by the same measure, perhaps even expect instant enlightenment) at a flick of a switch.

Anything worth having must first be earned. This is no epiphany, but a tired truth that is very difficult to swallow at times. Frankly working for something seems like such a bore and an inconsideration when the world is changing so fast.

Yet, sometimes the truth is hard as a brick wall or insurmountable as a mountain – but then, brick walls have been broken through and mountains have been cut down to size. However, the ingredients to overcome these obstacles have always been 'talent' coupled with, wait for it... time.

I once read that the person who opens his mouth before his turn is forever reminded of the value of keeping silent. Ditto for people who want to acquire possessions before its time – get the wife, kids, house, car, big screen TV (even if not necessarily in that order) before its due time and there are suddenly mortgages and loans to pay. Pretty soon you're not living the life you can afford and you're competing with the neighbours against the prime interest rate.

Growing up I never felt is necessary to keep up with the people around me when it came to possessions – I would like to believe that I lived my life according to my own rules of engagement. I figured out early enough that fewer possessions meant lesser hassles and that one should never allow 'possessions' to define oneself.

That simple rule has a lot to say about how I have been able to preserve my sanity.

Whether or not I had a BMX bike for example (the craze during my formative years) did not define my sense of 'cool.'It just wasn't important enough. Besides it came to pass that more people would want to borrow my friend's BMXs to ride than my non-entity of a two-wheeler, so that was a good thing too.

This truth translates well to even things later in life, be it wives, cars or houses - the too pretty ones are never worth the upkeep or the headache. Particularly in these times of instant gratification when so many people don't want to work to earn the rewards but just want to possess it in the false vanity that those possessions will define who they are.

Which in my estimation simply means living for the approval and the admiration of other people, i.e. subjecting my life choices (and the heartaches I endure as a result) to the materialistic fancies of people who don't really matter.

For example, I am certain that none of my friends are my friends because I happen to own a Ferrari. I am doubly certain of this fact because I DON'T own (nor ever owned) a Ferrari, and they are still around. Most certainly my neighbours would admire me more had I a Ferrari in the driveway – but the question then is, why do I need his admiration to validate myself?

Really why does anyone need people they don't know to validate them and make them feel good?

I believe with a passion that all good things come to those who wait – and in my life I have diligently waited (rather impatiently at times, I'm sure) and delightfully discovered that if I maintain to do my part of the work all the things I ever wanted do, in fact, materialise on its own. The key is not just patience but also a good attitude while waiting.

Bottomline - while people probably wouldn't really mind having the patience, it's really the waiting for the rewards that's such a bother.

Perception error: Just because the brain says so

One of the first senses we learn to trust completely as a child is 'sight' – the most duplicitous of the five senses, because it is the one that we find the hardest to discount.

After all, when we 'see' something right in front of us how can we discount it as not true?

What we see vs. what is
(Image from blog: Tao News)

Yet sight, unlike all the other senses, is strongly driven by one's perceptions and so can be biased by what one wants to see – physically and meta-physically speaking.

We are all conditioned by our environment and our internal coding – and it is this coding that triggers our reactions to the stimuli in question. How we see something is already embedded in our circuitry – programmed by our environment and/or our influences.

A baby is not born racist for example, but is conditioned through experiences and, often, encouragement of sweeping generalisations. Blind faith in what's true for the goose must be true for the gander will make (and has made) philistines of us all...

But only if we let it.

I will be the first to admit that I can be weak (yes, it is true) but it only through realisation of where one's weakness lies can the inadequacy be addressed and strengthened. The trick is to be honest to yourself and recognise the weakness as just that... a weakness, something that can be and needs to be addressed.

We all wallow in some form of denial or other at some point of our lives. Some wallow in it for so long that they start to believe their own prejudices. This happens when we least expect it – conformity sets in within a collective and a false sense of comfort is nurtured.

Thankfully every collective has a proverbial pebble in the shoe – some pick out the pebble and leave it behind (i.e. address it) while others painfully suffer the angst, hoping that it will go away; it doesn't. What it eventually does though, given time, is convince the collective that all shoes pinch.

Just like everything is taken at face value, again nothing is ever what it seems. It is imperative that we realise it sooner than later. And while generalisations could be a good guide for the first steps on this unsteady journey, it should never ever be allowed to be a thumb rule that governs our lives anymore.

The journey to recapture the truth (to finally 'see' things as they are) and recalibrate one's perception errors is fraught with difficult attitudinal adjustments. There are are great rewards at the end but so too are there discomforts on the way. Having said that, man is a creature of comfort and what can be more comfortable than conformity and just taking things as they come.

Perhaps 'seeing' is too over-rated to need correction for, and life is better lived through the rose-coloured tints of collective conformity. Maybe after all this, it's not “us” who have a attitude problem, but “them” who have a perception problem.