A prominent position in society demands a perfection in personality and a price that few people are prepared for. An insecurity here, a little bit of ego there can cast aspersions on the noblest of intentions. With a level of scrutiny that growing up in a stable milieu can hardly provide testing grounds for, mountains are easily made from mole hills, actions and words taken out of context and blown out of proportions, often coloured with the careers of journalists, the pronouncements of society that is only too happy to think as a crowd for the crowd in the eternal quest for patting itself on the back, and the eye of the individual narrowed under the weight of past baggage.
I recently read the story of an American couple who discontinued graduate studies in established universities and continued them on the wildest of terrains in sub-Saharan Africa. I can only guess as to what meaning of life and what lofty goals they set ought to discover and achieve. Right there, in the beginning of that story itself was a parallel, though loose, between their lives and the life of the Grizzly Man, made famous by Werner Herzog, though I would, with much less hesitancy, brand Timothy Treadwell a conscious lunatic.
To quite literally cut the long story short (the article meandered in great detail in the New Yorker for pages and pages seemingly detailing every single interesting conversation that ever happened), the couple started off with the noble intentions of studying wildlife in their natural habitats, found themselves at the centre of a poaching epidemic, discovered they had the means for a local solution to the problem, dedicated the following years to implementing the local solution, and at some point the determination to rid the locality of the epidemic overtook their personal lives and, if some accounts are to be believed, morals even, only for governments, society and the media to begin indeterminate investigations into their foibles and recast their whole lives in new frameworks that sought to be consistent with their perceived, glaring faux pas.
"To bear a ring of power is to be alone" goes the immortal line from Gandalf.
To bring on the burden of the ring while still discovering oneself makes the said burden much more difficult to bear and lo and behold! there's a stumble. Such stumbles are indeed necessary as opportunities to learn about ourselves, but society is far less forgiving than we are of ourselves. I would much rather we develop first and then set out in society to help others. I take heart at the pearls of wisdom from people immeasurably wiser than me.
“All men seek peace first of all with themselves. That is necessary, because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before we can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him. Even when he tries to do good to others his efforts are hopeless, since he does not know how to do good to himself. In moments of wildest idealism he may take it into his head to make other people happy: and in doing so he will overwhelm them with his own unhappiness. He seeks to find himself somehow in the work of making others happy. Therefore he throws himself into the work. As a result he gets out of the work all that he put into it: his own confusion, his own disintegration, his own unhappiness." - from No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton.
I recently read the story of an American couple who discontinued graduate studies in established universities and continued them on the wildest of terrains in sub-Saharan Africa. I can only guess as to what meaning of life and what lofty goals they set ought to discover and achieve. Right there, in the beginning of that story itself was a parallel, though loose, between their lives and the life of the Grizzly Man, made famous by Werner Herzog, though I would, with much less hesitancy, brand Timothy Treadwell a conscious lunatic.
To quite literally cut the long story short (the article meandered in great detail in the New Yorker for pages and pages seemingly detailing every single interesting conversation that ever happened), the couple started off with the noble intentions of studying wildlife in their natural habitats, found themselves at the centre of a poaching epidemic, discovered they had the means for a local solution to the problem, dedicated the following years to implementing the local solution, and at some point the determination to rid the locality of the epidemic overtook their personal lives and, if some accounts are to be believed, morals even, only for governments, society and the media to begin indeterminate investigations into their foibles and recast their whole lives in new frameworks that sought to be consistent with their perceived, glaring faux pas.
"To bear a ring of power is to be alone" goes the immortal line from Gandalf.
To bring on the burden of the ring while still discovering oneself makes the said burden much more difficult to bear and lo and behold! there's a stumble. Such stumbles are indeed necessary as opportunities to learn about ourselves, but society is far less forgiving than we are of ourselves. I would much rather we develop first and then set out in society to help others. I take heart at the pearls of wisdom from people immeasurably wiser than me.
“All men seek peace first of all with themselves. That is necessary, because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before we can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him. Even when he tries to do good to others his efforts are hopeless, since he does not know how to do good to himself. In moments of wildest idealism he may take it into his head to make other people happy: and in doing so he will overwhelm them with his own unhappiness. He seeks to find himself somehow in the work of making others happy. Therefore he throws himself into the work. As a result he gets out of the work all that he put into it: his own confusion, his own disintegration, his own unhappiness." - from No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton.
