DonInChelsea


June 2nd 2006

copyright© don oddy

~ determination ~

determination is when the quality of mind can remain still and uninterrupted by the bumps of life.

Even when we feel that the chips are down and life really sucks, we still have determination inside us. Determination, that inner grit which keeps us striving and pushing for things we may want, things we believe we should and must have. Our trouble always lies in the should and must imperatives.

When we should have achieved something, there is a way to go, we are yet to succeed and indeed we might view our situation as a failure. These shoulds’ of life, driven by us sometimes, often imposed on us by others, they are the bane of life, the very devil of worry and downers of life.

Determination is certainly a two edged grip on us. We can be determined and gritty, we can seek to achieve the impossible, we can be determined to do the right thing even if its ultimately the wrong thing to be doing.

Determination has sent many an individual to great success and others to an early grave. Like all things determination can be as useful to us as any tool of endeavour, working with us or against us.

The bumps of life, we are forever encountering these bumps, the daily grind which makes us slow or quicken our pace to or from adversity. We need be conscious to take a pause and breath, to render ourselves motionless long enough to stop reacting, and then try responding.

Responding to life, when it is possible to slow our spinning top, to break out of reaction to cause and effect and make use of our learning, then we can apply a determined view and set of actions to our situations.

We all have bumps in life and necessarily some bumps need speedy and swift actions, reactions or we get run down in front of some calamity. We learn the wisdom, to move and be adept, to avoid calamity, and at the same time, we strategise, we find patterns and review our daily predicaments, we respond.

When we are dogged and follow with slavish devotion a particular and single path, when we give up our right to question and revise, we are determined by dogma, we need beware our own values and principles, which will surely drag us down into misery.

We need be determined and flexible, we need be resolute and realistic, we need be firm and pragmatic, we need to use our brains to see what is in front of us and what our consequences could be. We need to utilise everything we have at our disposal on a daily basis, for daily, the world turns and changes.

Our world so full of rocks and hard places, so full of masters without servants. Our world often governed by fools and not masterful leaders. Our imperfect world.

News in the world this day, that atrocities are again being uncovered on the world stage. We recoil and feel our denial rise as we sit behind our democratic fences and our agents may have done great harm and injustice. We might be determined to find out the right and wrongs. We need be more determined these horrors don’t occur again, by our voting power across this world.

We put the world to no sense of right as our leaders offer captors rendition, another name for torture by agents of democracy. And done in the fight against terror. Democracy was never predicated or defended on acts of terror, it was in defence against tyranny that we developed our democracy. State sponsored vengeance and for profit are misleading and incomplete answers to this current round of bad misdeeds by our leaders. There is a madness in these leaders who resort to violence over and over to secure their world view, far from democracy and yet determined in their folly.

What can we do? We can react with horror and we can respond with our vote. And we can condemn wrong doing proven beyond doubt. We can offer our democratic way forward as we see others doing the same, and not slip back into old habits as we have seen in recent years. Bush and Blair, their antics have driven democracy back decades in their foolish and sanctimonious pursuits of righteous prosecution of illegal war. Determined they are misguided and mad they certainly seem to be, reactionary and oblivious of their consequences now becoming clearer year on year. And not with hindsight are my words formed, for back in 1991 I said what would occur if the retaliation and middle east was set as they intended. I wrote it and the record proves them, that is Bush and Blair, so determined, most likely ruined democracy and its growth for however long they are remembered as our representatives. Time they were gone, more timely will be their end of tenure in their leader roles. Jack Ass and Jackanapes Bush and Blair, I hope they live long and experience their consequences and answer them daily.

We see always the determined, so driven to act, when the reality is response and thinking and feeling our way forward, gradually and incrementally. They have taught us again the folly of reaction and this world event either a speed in the collapse of old politics or rendering us open to decades of conflict.

So easy to see the world differently might we determine a new vision of paths we can take.

And when we see our leaders take backward steps to ruin and the thinkers and seers are ignored in peril, we might wonder at our leaders and choices of the future.

These bumps in world orders affect everyone alike, and conflicts and terrors will keep on growing as inequalities are made lawful across country borders. Iran being our next folly if not already recognised. What happened to Korea, was it too far to stretch? Or did something else make this axis of power shift?

Behind all of this is economy and profit. And what of the climate we know its changing? All these matters arising in benign conflicting interest, hell bent on destruction in no time at all. Determine as we might we need some response, something far better than what we have now. Our global positions are not sustainable, who gives in first is hardly the issue. Determined to meet the needs of all peoples, something and someone will come to our rescue? Not as things are in this lifetime I suspect for we are all in the same boat, we just don’t recognise its so.

~
Copyright © Don Oddy



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principles