GBS

Perhaps the man ought to have been called GPS … like the gadget in cars … for he was of such a disposition … in the way he related to others. But like the GPS a man needed to have a clear sense of his identity, locale and a true personality reflective of the location he was in … for such is the nature of our social relations in the world … in so far as we respect the personality of others and account for the difference it makes from us.

No doubt our bouts with patriotism and national pride makes of us such loyal adherents to what we are in our part of the world … but do we also make of it a volitional part of our personality that weathers through rain and storm to simply be what we are? To do so would be to identify with the little things in our own backyards … the clothing, food, women, speech and lifestyle … and to do so as part of the world … not as the world itself.

Too often we shelter behind the altruist and claim to an international identity of equality and freedom … away from the provincial nature of our isolated selves … as yet unintegrated into a fine world experience. In doing so … we make no improvement to the world … neither do we do a service to our own cultural identity. We are like the princess in the tower … dependent on a stoic fascination of that which loneliness and deprivation brings to our senses.

Human personality combines the passion and understanding of his experience to present a part of the personality of the all. Its dependent on the touch we make with the environment around our daily lives. Sadly the folks who get the opportunity for an education are the least prepared to deal with such an issue … scampering as they do into a dodgem of manners … while appearing to be good natured. It serves not the cause of the social nor the vibrancy of the spirit.

Somewhere in our learning we came upon the notion that an education would take us away from all that was in that way provincial and pedantic. It promised the world and the real deal of a man who is coming to identify with a greater truth than the daily crow of the rooster on the roof who views his environment up to the last tree on the hill.

And yet when we get the opportunity to do so we are in such a bind about whether to say more about less or vice-versa. The fact is the world is the greater self of our existence … and it comes to make contact with us in the endeavor to make of our partial identities whole in relation to it. That and only that is the clear and coherent manner of engaging our lives in which the world is already at the doorstep … egging to be let in.

Does it give us more joy to say the Brit, the Yank, the Oriental and the Indic make my life in the world more fun because … they will do what I tell them to … or they will simply take after what I'm doing? Or does it mean more to say these fellas out there make my life more meaningful where I am? That they have enriched my life with their presence?

What we experience in our individual natures is no more nor less than what is out there in the world … and like an array of mirrors, they reflect the many parts we experience in the world as man. But to appreciate the incredible diversity of life … we have to commit to one thing … our own … and to cherish it as much as a thing that is unique and rare … in a world of nations … where there are many more such uniqueness.

Then can we rightly say that the man-of-faith we see ourselves as is truly a GPS … in reflecting and appreciating the diversity of life … not merely the gratification of skin tissue that dreams of such a relation to the world from within its turret of isolation. Perhaps we say others don't care or resist the growing globalization of qualities … many still do … as if that mattered to our own focus of purpose about ourselves … our intelligence … beauty … and the will to take to something new.

George Bernard Shaw, the British playwright, saw the hopelessness in his own wish fulfilling melancholy that sought simply to make itself deserve more. Perhaps he knew of the other George … who went down in a hail of arrows … at Little Bighorn. GBS was twenty at that time … and something in a bard that identifies himself with the uniqueness of people in the world … may have perished along in the pudding. The year Custer died, GBS left his work in Dublin and moved to London to stay with his mother ... commencing his illustrious writing career from there. A coincidence perhaps but like I said … the GPS is strange that way.