Past & future -- and the spaces in between

Much exhortation is doing the rounds at present to look back on 2008 and list the things for which one is grateful. This is a noble and laudable call, for in considering moments of radiance, we may see beauty, splendour and wonderment.

At watershed moments such as the onset of a new calendar year, one’s heart is brimming with expectations of a full system reboot, a clean start, leaping hopes and dreams in which we soar. Looking back is then an exercise in shoring up defences, building reserves of strength and taking great gulps of the oxygen of gritty endurance and pumping motivation.

It is also a time to be genuinely appreciative of the crown of success, the caprice of unexpected good fortune, the happy outcome of a critical time. Whether you call it good luck, destiny, kismet or the grace of God (I prefere the last one), is irrelevant. The common thread of gratitude is universal.

However, the innate vicissitudes of existence are such that listing sources of gratitude force one to contemplate the cruel disappointments of the year gone by — the heartaches, mistakes, losses, injustices, dead-ends and undeserved brutalities. To quote James Clark: “It may be great to soar like an eagle, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines”.

In looking back personally I see far more dark matter, dark energy than the radiance of too-few stars. Somehow the volume of black cloud always seems to overshadow the thin slivers of silver lining. Somehow there is a vast unknowable expanse of blackness in between the shining stars. Somehow there are more futile chases than satisfying captures. And somehow there are more bad things and bad people and plain bad luck in the world than there are the opposites.

Maybe the cosmologists or geneticists or mathematicians can explain this conundrum which just seems to be since the Big Bang 14-billion years ago (give or take your or my lifetime).

In contemplating the strange nine months spent at eNews Channel, Mark Anthony’s words over the slain Julius Caesar leap to mind: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”.

Personally I have much to ululate about — and much of which I am deeply ashamed. What I have achieved is negligible though my intentions might have been clad in noble moral armour. But my nearest and dearest have surmounted gargantuan heights.

My first grandson was born to the bravest couple I know. My younger son won more awards, academic, sporting and humanitarian, than this blog has space for, crowning the year with four distinctions in matric. One day he will change the world as we know it, of that there is no doubt.

Numerous people have had profoundly positive effects on me. My brother, as firm and dependable as the moon; my father, the wisest and most compassionate human I know, friends like Chris and Jules, Jan and Lynn, Johan and Ronel, Heather and Chris who have always helped me pull the tiller back on course.

It would be immoral not to consider the individuals whose mostly silent guidance have kept the shaky bucket-o’-bolts ship “Kriel” afloat. Paul Dunn, Rian Malan, Zane Wilson, Deon Kloppers, Nadine Schmal, Ferial Haffajee, Rob Brown, Richard Albrechts, Lebo Manomogalo, Nausheena Mahomet, Gareth Edwards, Iman Rappetti, Tumaole Mohlaoli, Ray White, Dario Milo, Peter Gabriel, Francis Collins, Robert Winston, Kevin Scott, Charlotte Kilbane, Bob Dylan, Andre Brink, the wonderful friend (whose identity I will protect) who is the only person to have foiught and survived the as-yet-unnamed arenavirus that killed three people this year and, of course my ex-wife, Debbie Huntington, have all had profound effects in bringing me through an annus horribilis — most of the time in ways they didn’t even understand.

I think it is probably defamatory or something to name all the mighty, evil, cruel, vindictive, incompetent, callous and power-crazed untermensch who form the black holes in the universe of humanity and whose effects are more diabolical than they comprehend.

And now, as we all face what looks set to be the mother of bad years this century, we need the strength and solace of good people, good intentions, intestinal and testicular fortitude, perseverance and truckloads of good luck and God’s grace. Future blogs will comes from a country far, far away under circumstances much, much different.

I hope it will be a winning formula. God bless.