The Return
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General
Hello folks, and welcome to my new blog. Setting this up was occasioned by the impending demise of my original Opera Blog, which (alas!) is now to go the way of all things, as the Powers That Be at Opera have decided that (after all these years) this is a part of their community which they no longer wish to maintain. Previous postings will be rescued and archived here, one at a time.
However, it was not just the demise of the blog which made me consider actually setting up a proper, paid Web presence. Before the onset of Opera’s fateful decision, my main free e-mail service of many years, Yahoo, similarly decided that a revamp was required, and unfortunately, the result of this appears to be semi-functional, working properly only with their “recommended” browsers, and still requiring frequent reloads. So the time for a proper, “professional” e-mail service where I could get feedback and advice seemed to have arrived. And then there’s the question of the NSA . . .
I guess we could say that things change as life progresses, and that it is probably less than realistic to hope that a familiar and trusted on-line service should remain completely available and reliable until we are finally shoved in the ground; and so often, the new is forced upon us when we preferred the old. But on the other hand, as I discovered, the cost of a “proper” service was not equivalent to an arm and a leg, and is far less than a lot of other annual costs which I pay without thinking.
Those things in our lives which we take for granted and always expect to be there for us represent a kind of prison, even a tyranny, and it is the duty of all human beings to escape them. Over-dependence upon such things as free mail servers, TV and the dubious purveyors of so-called “knowledge” creates a psychological prison from which escape can be difficult until we learn to change our attitudes and habits; and that process begins when we decide that we have tolerated as much of our habit-worn situation as possible, and that the time for change in our lives has finally arrived. Until we approach that crucial moment, the small psychological box we have constructed for ourselves, which exists between our ears, is at once a prison and a coffin.
My former life in the UK was a set of habits. I went to work each day. I had a car and a place where I lived. I ate certain foods and drank certain drinks. But there was never any real progress. Every working day was pretty much the same as the one which preceded it; the tasks I had to perform each day were much the same; it all led nowhere. And it had little or nothing to do with the career for which I had been undergoing my undergraduate education – I had been repeatedly shunted sideways into other areas where my “transferable skills” were useful to others, and it seemed to me that this was a waste. The work, also, was often of a temporary nature, which is not really good for one’s fortunes. If I were in that situation today with the knowledge and experience that I have now, perhaps things would have worked out differently; but it is major error to spend large parts of one’s life fretting about “how it might have been . . . if only I had done things a different way . . . if only I had not made that decision . . . if only . . . if only . . .”
So it does seem that the fact that I find myself sitting here now, typing in a new blog, is an important part of the journey, the progression, the experience, the enlightenment and – perhaps – the approach to the numinous, the seeking of the thing which haunts us all our days and drives us to do the things we feel are necessary for our development and evolution as individuals; it is perhaps just one stage among many, one of many possible timelines which are forever in the future, waiting to unfold as each decision in my life is made, for better or worse. But again: regretting one’s decisions, when they turn out bad, is an error and should instead be re-framed as a learning experience. The events in our lives, better or worse as they may turn out to be, are all experiences from which we can learn; this is a crucial restatement of how we should see the reality which surrounds us.
The day that I flew out from Heathrow Airport to my first destination in East Asia was truly the day that my life changed. I have to tell you now that I have never regretted that decision.
As for my blog’s new home, I chose this particular WordPress template, which its creator named “Colourise”, because I felt that viewers should not have their eyes stabbed by a bright set of web pages. Personally, I tend to stay in subdued light environments, especially at night and at home, so something subdued seemed to be appropriate.
The title is essentially an optimistic one: in the West, we have always looked eastwards to the rising sun as the harbinger of the future, the deliverer of the new day, the saviour from the night; and even though the sun rises each morning, the sense of “newness” is still there, the sense of hope for what is to come and the idea that, somewhere beyond that far horizon, new lands, new vistas and new peoples lay waiting for us to discover them – perhaps, as Kipling memorably put it:
Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes
On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated – so:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges –
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
With this thought foremost in mind (although I have always been something of an armchair explorer), and preparing also for a change of job and location, I stride forth into the light of the new morning.
Tags: experience, habits, harbinger, horizon, knowledge, life, numinous, prison, regret, saviour, tyranny
