I settled onto the bench the council had put out in their efforts to bring people into the city centre, to create a sense of community. The dappled leaves of the tree planted in the concrete gave me blessed shade on this fine and sunny day. I like people watching, especially the young, full of life, showering confidence in their wake as they swan down the sidewalk.
Loudly chattering like flocks of exotic birds. Clustered together; small tribes of conquering souls armoured in their latest knock off fashions that proclaimed their affiliations. The brightness of youth is like a draught of ambrosia filling my old heart and soul with that long ago promises of conquering the world anew.
Every generation feels that they have a connection to the divine. They hold a deeper and more personal understanding of the world. That they will fix to right all that those who have gone before them have forsaken. Ahh, I smiled at the blithe arrogance of youth challenging the status quo with their posturing and electronics.
Eyes half shut, looking to those who passed by like an old man sleeping in the dappled sunlight I let my mind float back to days of my youth. When I strutted my stuff down the street, trying to catch the eye of the ladies, returned from war to a land of plenty. Pushing back the memories of death and wretchedness, we were the conquering heroes. Peace existed because of our sacrifice.
I was of the generation who played out our arrogance in theatre of war, far from our homelands. We lost the gloss of youth in the hard truth of the trenches, in the mud and the blood. Then we begat the generation that embraced peace, make love not war as their way of rejecting the actions of their parents. Loving the mother who nurtured us was their connection to the divine. For those of us who had faced the abyss they were beautiful in their innocence. But innocence cannot last. The actions of the world wear upon the gloss and the requirement of living embeds a practicality in the everyday and innocence drifts away.
From their innocence they begat the consumers, everything in the world was theirs to use and abuse. Competition was strife in the boardrooms of the multimillion dollars companies that became legal entities that took ownership of the land, the seas, the sky, water and the sun. They ate the world in great gulps, they tore out chunks to serve up on platters to the consumers. Who then begat the protectors: the eco warriors who shamed those that had gone before and demanded change.
With my eyes half closed I watched the little theatre of life that played out before me on the streets of my small town. The streets were filled with the tribes, the fighters, the peacemakers, the consumers, the rebels and the protectors all twisted and twined into the thread of life. From time immemorial we have cycled through these patterns and they will flow with human nature into the far and distant future.
We are human, we are quarrelsome, we are innocent, we are fallible, we are tenacious, we are innovative, we are loving and we live in a circle of life. The young ones I watched would learn that passion softens as realities of living take hold but passion never dies, it still a quiet burn in this old man sitting on the bench in the dappled sunlight.
