156: Looking back - a moment of reflection, with help from Primo Levi and others

Tomorrow - Tuesday - I have to go to a funeral. It is of a teacher at my old school. She joined as a new member of staff, fresh out of university I would imagine, just as I was coming to the end of my school days. She never taught me but we played badminton together, were Facebook friends and caught up from time to time at school events - she became the Head later. Her husband was my PE teacher and they both came to my wedding reception in London. She passed away at 56, I am 51.

In the same town as the crematorium lives my first professional boss, D. - someone I admired very much. Fresh out of university he was my line manager. But we lost touch over the years and a mutual friend got me his number. So, I contacted him via WhatsApp and we are meeting after what must be more than a decade and a half.

I began to wonder how I might sum up my adult life for D.. Even in broad themes, there are positives and negatives.

Negatives
I had a great start to my professional career - following graduation. The details are unimportant but I gained rapid promotion, delivered sales (after a stuttering start), gained expatriate positions and worked for the CEO of a US$15b organisation by 32. Ready for the next leap!

Then my bosses were fired. I was initially offered a global role and a contract was promised 'by the end of the week' by the global head of HR. But someone apparently 'lobbied' against me and I was shafted and made redundant.

This blew my career and I had to start again. It robbed me of confidence. It robbed me of faith - that doing the right things gain their reward, which had been the case to that point.

On the personal front, I got married in 1999 at a time when things were going well professionally and I felt I was ready to share my life and grow with a partner. We moved from the UK to India and then France and life was exciting. We had a baby in 2005.

Things were never great - Entry 155 - but I did my best as a husband and father. Then, after / despite many years of taking shit, was finally told in 2015 that I was ' incompetent, weird, a tramp, uncaring, selfish, impotent, shameful, useless, callous and a pervert ' - an utter failure in every way.

So .... professionally and personally, do the right things and get shafted - or looking at it conversely, be a failure.

The third great theme in my life has been my son. He has been put upon and I often worry about the effect on him - just as I had a very angry mother in my childhood. He is my life and I try to support, apologise if I get angry ... I suspect his actions were fundamental in the dramatic turnaround of our marriage but will I fail him as well?

I should add there has been a fourth theme in my life and that is my friends and, on the same level, my cousin in the US - who have supported  me, shown me affection and chosen to see the best of me. I hope I retain that love and do nothing to destroy the bonds.

Positives

People say - in any walk of life - that it is important to 'enjoy the process' because the conclusions are open to so many variables. So, top sportspeople will opine that the result is secondary to the process - that 'the journey' is the value. I wonder and question if that is true but accept the premise that just relying on the result is to, potentially, do yourself down and that trying for the best is the real quest.

In ordinary life, the summits of 'success' are lower. And so, if, in my negatives, I have failed ultimately, have I 'succeeded' in the journey?

Well, we are all healthy but that is down to luck and genes. I have made materially useful and positive contributions to the businesses I have worked for. I have lived and negotiated in various countries and enjoyed a good proportion of my professional life. Financially, we have been sound though not at all extravagantly rich  - nice places to stay, holidays, little bar on spend, good private school.

Having been shafted early in my career, I let work take a back seat and have been very fortunate in being able to be the 'dad' that I wanted to be  while still being able to support a reasonable standard of life.

I have a valued set of friends. I enjoy sport and try to look after myself. Life has given me a lot and I am very grateful. And I would not, for the world, change the experience that I have had with my son. He is 14 now and I say to him, 'who is my love?', 'who is my hero?', 'who is my life?', 'who is my reason for living?' and he responds, 'I am', 'I am', 'I am', 'I am.' 

Conclusions

So there are a lot of positives, but am I left with the feeling - to quote a poem that my brother put up on Facebook - that I am the 'god of small things'?

She stood still behind the metal fence as he approached

As still as one made of alabaster or marble
Dusty white with a dishevelled mane
Not a muscle twitched or an ear flicked
She waited and watched with her big grey eyes.

Surely it could not be because she remembered
How on a snowy dark dawn he had wandered past and looked at her
And had regretted not having had an apple to give
He wondered on the finiteness of memory
As carefully he edged close.

‘I am tired’, he whispered, as he touched her forehead
‘Of being the god of small things.
The light bulb fixed or the zipper mended
The car serviced or the insurance paid or the passport renewed.
I am tired of not being able to deal with the mind.’

She reared her head slightly, as if to understand,
Then nuzzled closer and her warm breath sniffed his coat
As if to ask if food lay concealed. A gentle recognition among fellow beings.
‘I am tired of not knowing where giving becomes taking
Where love ends and pain begins, where more is less and the world is too fractured to understand.
I think I will give up soon. But I promise to bring you an apple before I go.’

Yes, this may be the case.

I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at a certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don't know:
It would not serve me at all to know
Since the tiredness stays just the same.
The wound hurts as it hurts
And not in function of the cause that produced it.
Yes, I am tired,

Fernando Pessoa

And, yet, I must remember:

Resonance: So many times I have had this debate with myself and with her. Entry 141, Entry 21

You who live safe

In your warm houses;
You who find on returning in the evening
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a bit of bread
Who dies because of a yes and because of a no

Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
Without enough strength to remember
Vacant eyes and cold womb
Like a frog in the winter:

Reflect on the fact that this has happened:
These words I commend to you:
Inscribe them on your heart
When staying at home and going out,

Going to bed and rising up;
Repeat them to your children:
Or may your house fall down,
Illness bar your way,
Your loved ones turn away from you.

- Primo Levi


And be grateful for what I have received:

Resonance: Wow!! 'Kindness' as granted by friends and my son (Entry 114).

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

(poems courtesy of my brother and sister-in-law)