The first day of the rest of your life happens quite often, especially as you get older. I’ve known people who’ve quit smoking 400 times. But the very first of the first day of the rest of your life often happens when you are a child, and it is memorable enough that you can count a hundred days before and after it on a calendar of that year, and not remember a single one of them.
For me, this involved careening down my bucolic old street (looking back, the slope was rather gentle for careening) on a bike that had just been returned to me after a “misunderstanding” involving rampant prepubescent theft, a coalition of kind-hearted fathers, and a pair of sullen apologies. Pedals at my feet, I exulted in the late afternoon: school done, a treasure recovered, and my brave metal steed ready to take me the vast distance of maybe half a mile to the part of the river where I would, years later, sit moodily listening to Springsteen, wishing someone would take me away from it. Somewhere urban and gritty, where I could indulge in a different kind of cool misery.
Thinking back, it’s easy to believe that not one of the experiences—my dad’s painful conversation with the other kid’s dad (he hated confrontation more than I still do, firmly entrenched in the migrant ethos of creating no waves, ever), my losing and regaining a treasure, the joy of a busy elementary school afternoon turning into the grumpiness of a teen—was original. These feelings, even these events, had happened to
others more interesting, more sunny, more dramatic. It’s easy to think that your own defining moments are ubiquitous, and that we are all nothing but atoms in motion so repetitive that our lives—the sum total of those experiences—don’t matter much. Certainly, they cannot be worth recounting to any but those who love or tolerate us. Best to just get on with it.
But that’s nonsense. The whole point of that joyful afternoon was not the ride, the wind, the destination, the dumb, funny, angry looks on the faces of the passing ducks, the post office building manifesting a smile at me, or the town-defining bridge leaning forward to scoop me up as I raced past the fish-and-chip shop. It was the greatness of it as a feeling, sure—but the point was that it made me think, for the first time I can remember, that life can be grand on a scale like the Big Crashing Song, any time I wanted. That Events Had Meaning. All I had to do was wait till an afternoon or weekend, and race around and enjoy every minute.
I later discovered that the Big Crashing Song was the first piano concerto written by a bloke called Tchaikovsky. About fifty years later, I realised that you didn’t even need to wait for an afternoon or weekend—joy is there all around us, if we can learn to connect ourselves to it.
And there are, to be frank, an awful lot of people to thank.
Starting with the guy who wrote the Big Crashing Song and a few other pretty fair tunes, which introduced me to Mozart and Clara Schumann, Lennon and McCartney, The Stones, the Ramones, the Pistols and Gunners, the Mamas and the Papas, and a thousand funky others. Alan Moore was born with a birth caul, like my dad. Papa surviving birth, unlike scores of his kin, really helped my odds of doing the same. Alan survived and wrote a bunch of comic books that blew my head open after leaving the town with the river. Harold Bloom reckons a Middle Eastern woman wrote most of what modern Christians call the Bible, and I thank her for those wonderful, uplifting, terrifying tales. Also, very grateful to Austen, Jane, whose wings beat in 1812 and a few years thereafter—laughter still comes to me from Lady Catherine. That century brought us the inventor of my bike’s grandfather, some maligned European politicians who helped with child labour laws, others who dealt with smallpox and a million other diseases I never had to endure or expire from. I even avoided Dad’s TB. Someone fluoridated our water and gave me shots to avoid dying of what took away my uncles and aunts long before I could ever mourn them.
People like me quite literally stand on the shoulders of giants. Butterflies whose wings made zephyrs that blew gusts on my life and pushed it in directions unknown but marvellous. Here’s a school at the end of your street. Here’s a train station that will take you to a city and a free university degree. The butterflies’ wings pushed me hard towards opportunity and privilege.
There was plenty to regret, perhaps as much as the beautiful. Colonialists shoved their innocents and foisted them upon other peoples, gifting them with intergenerational traumas a Bible full of saints would struggle to forgive. But the fortunate like me can live meaningful lives because of the interconnection—through time and geography—as the gifts are passed on to us through the rhythms of history.
Surely, we owe someone for this.
Recognising the relentless connecting the Universe is doing—carrying millions of bits of humanity from one of us to the other, strangely making order while simultaneously careening (better than my bike) towards its entropic destiny—makes me stop and think. Why? Why does this interconnection create order? Is there a purpose? And… is that our purpose?
There is no answer, so we make up our own. None are bad as long as they don’t hurt others. Mine is as twee as a Hallmark card.
In 1770 a colonist reaches a place he calls Botany Bay, well-intentioned, and it would seem to have benefited me a lot more than the people who were there at the time, or their deeply bruised descendants. In that same year I benefit immensely from Beethoven being born and Amadeus really hitting his straps. I’m so lucky it is starting to get embarrassing.
In 1943 another boat lands in a harbour of the confused and vaguely frightened, in the other village I grew up in. Mum notes that Dad was a prisoner of war in a far-off land, and she and her sisters were concerned at the arrival of the liberators. They were perhaps not seen exactly that way by the “liberated.” I have centuries to collate and put together some injustices and work around them. In her own lifetime, only a handful of years later, Mum needed to accept those folk as liberators who won the war for “us” (well, the spelling was right) and that she loved her new land and her old land and all was well. This gigantic emotional whiplash was tolerated because she was smart and a woman and came from an island conquered so often over millennia that a new colonist could just take a number while waiting in the Greek amphitheatre to steal the Byzantine treasures walking past the Spanish architecture. The volcano, implacable, watched on. It’s not as easy for others, including the Indigenous locals she met in this new country, who became her sisters in patient confusion.
We owe it to Lincoln, to Pasteur, to Marie Curie, and millions of others upon whose shoulders we sit to use their gifts for something other than our own self-aggrandisement. First, we should introduce ourselves and say hi to history—learn about John Stuart Mill of our own free will (thanks, Pythons) and thank Descartes for his smart part in our thinking. And say hello to geography and our world—see what governments and industry and war and adventure and all the things happening today are doing to us right now. Not to distress our children but to understand. And when understand we do, and the mirror tells us we just may be the kind of person for whom fortune has been kind (do you have running water? Can you read? That kind of thing) then we should act.
Because the interconnection between us all, our participation in the superhighway of history and the now, is more than trite observation and umbilical gazing. It may be a call to action. It is a cry to those for whom the butterflies beat them towards safety and comfort—regardless of our own narratives of how hard we’ve worked to get it—to use the opportunities we have to right the course for others, no matter how small. If history has taught us anything, if chaos theory or the determination of the Universe to embugger us all with its sliding door nudges is real, then we know that even our gentlest acts of kindness to each other may create intergenerational good.
Some folks are determined to polish their house perfectly every time they clean. So they do it once a year. The rest of the time it looks like a disaster. Others who can tolerate imperfection have magnificent, sparkling surfaces as they do a little every day to keep things shipshape. I hope that our attitude to kindness is the same—if we accept that we owe those less fortunate than ourselves something, as a consequence of the gift the world gave us in being born to who and where and when we did—let’s all repay that in small, constant moments, our way of living, rather than waiting years for the time to make a Big Gesture. Imagine a world where everyone, every day, loved each other. Works for me. I hope you love the interconnection between all of us alive today, and all of us who have ever lived, and perhaps that makes us all family. And like all families, some members deserve serious, meaningful reparation—to be heard and respected. I look forward to that new world, and us all working towards it.
Antonio (A/Prof Antonio Di Dio) is a KanYini volunteer author of this creative article. cdidio@iprimus.com.au
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Love it, kindness theme continues to enrich our lives. Well written