GADFLY

Aristotle's defence at his trail:

"If you kill me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me."

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of the truth"

The gadfly needs to be the postmodern man. The pinprick, the balloon deflator, the applier of cold water, the translator of signs, the voice that cries in the wilderness and the hand that stays the onslaught.

...I talk to the wind.

And the gadfly needs to start, by healing thyself. It is no good pontificating to an uncaring world with vacuous words. There is enough of that already. You begin by cleansing the dross of a lifetime that is your identity and place in this world. The unexamined life is not worth living as Aristotle also wisely added. Almost all that we are and believe has never been questioned or examined. We are a collection of disparate influences: family, community, peers, school and media. We have swallowed the menu whole in unquestioning obedience as good members of our society and culture. Now it is about time we look at ourselves and what we represent with an unjaundiced eye and a reasoned temperament. Undauntingly we must challenge our deepest core beliefs and values to find out if they pass the true test in the clear light of day. Then and only then can we proceed to view the wide expanse or our community, culture, nation and planet with open eyes and begin to effect a change which could transform our lives.

We must rub our eyes and throw off the sleepiness so as to begin to walk in the daylight of a mature human life. The childish things need to go. We are not playing with toys anymore.

TIME: A Double-Edged Sword

The one thing missing in this time-obsessed world is time itself. We are so busy, our days so filled with activity that another day is gone before we even realise it had started. Time is money: what a curious thought. In our commoditized world it might make sense but it is a very dangerous phrase. Time is your life! It better be worth more than money. Otherwise we are dead people. I believe that time is the one precious experience we need the most and have the least of in this modern world. And by time I mean that totally free time, competely seperate from our daily whirl. We do not take time to get away from it all and remove ourselves from our personal daily circumstances enmeshed in the drama of our culture in which we are so deeply identified. We need time to decompress first. We cannot realise what is going on or what we could possibly be missing till we radically seperate ourselves for awhile to let that chaotic momentum wash away from us. Only when that occurs can the real process begin. A certain seperation, isolation and distance is needed to give the perspective that will accomplish the goal. A complete change of scenery and geography is probably best and that is why travel can be such a tonic when it allows us to confront the world and ourselves in a totally different way and forces us to climb out of that morass of daily life. A wise man wrote extolling the efficacy of idleness. Allowing such a taboo idea into our focussed world could give us permission to step back and take stock outside the prism of the daily grind. The problem confronted here like with all issues contains a joy and a challenge. The joy is the opportunity to step away from your normal routine and glimpse another possibility. The challenge being that we all bring along our own excess personal baggage making it difficult to appreciate the experience and to throw up all kinds of reistance to it. Our personal baggage needs a weight limit. Otherwise all the possibility recedes into irrelevance. We invariably we feel impelled to do something when confronted by these moments of opportunity. The being has to precede the doing. We are so used to our cluttered routines that when confronted with quiet solitude and self-reflection we to tend to run away as from a disastrous encounter. Are we up to this? Do we want it? If not how do we break the cycle we are stuck in and for which we feel an obvious disatisfaction.
Again we reach another puzzle and the answer is in the unravelling.