Unfolding

Joseph, my friend in Vancouver, sent me some old black and white pictures. They depict scenes in Sri Lanka when the country was known as Ceylon, the Paradise Island. These pictures are interesting, provoking a variety of emotions within me. 

“Time is a dressmaker specialising in alterations.” – Faith Baldwin

But the scenes have now drastically changed, and continue to change even today. I remember, in the late ’50s and the early ’60s, seeing hundreds of fishermen’s sailing boats in Trincomalee where my adolescent life and teen time were spent. People used to call these little boats with huge sails pai kappal’, literally ‘mat ship’. In these boats, as the fishermen reach the shores they will roll the sails as if rolling the mats early morning from their deep sleep! These boats, now replaced by bigger boats with smaller engines, upon reaching shores, carry the engines on their shoulders as if carrying pillows. Today, very rarely one might see a ‘pai kappal’ around Trincomalee waters! 

Becoming, a kind of changing, an unfolding of the new, an evolving, and a growing are part of not only a landscape — nation’s history — but also my everyday life. This is the very essence of life. ‘Yes, I know it; it is a fact that all know it. So, why bother?’ A justifiable critique and an assertion! 

The need to reflect on the fact of ‘unfolding’, for me then, is caused by awareness. It is my cognizance of the in-built, or the immanent resistance to the continuous unfolding, or the potential growth. Such fighting emerges from a kind of inclination to the ingrained comfort in the status quo within one’s soul. 

In the Tamil proverbial tradition, this is very succinctly announced: ‘puthu seruppu kadikkum’, meaning, -The new shoe bites. Hence the reluctance to change. 

I have seen this within my soul as well. But I have gone through tsunamic changes in my life. It is this that led to the sudden sharp learning curve — a process of accommodating the unfolding — that I went through since St Patrick’s Day of 2010. 

I am, I am aware, continually evolving, or becoming into a person I was not forty, thirty, twenty, ten years, or even a year ago.

My values — what I actually now let my eyes see, ears hear, feet walk towards, my hands reach for, my heart desires, or my mind imagines — has been changed as I journey through new times. 

I know from the moment my life began, I have been evolving and growing. As an infant, through trial and error, I learned to crawl, walk and speak. In that I am not different to Justin, my grandson, whom I watched crawling in my bonus room, then walking in my moccasins and running around the kitchen island expecting me to run behind to catch him, but now playing with his friends in the park preferring not my eyes to fall on him! Earlier, Gitanjali, my only daughter, went through this ‘becoming’ to eventually birthing Justin.

Today with another, almost, ten or twenty years ahead of me, growing in harmony with that unfolding that continues in my soul is necessary for me. My feet yesterday cooperated well with my soul in discovering beauty along the backwaters of Harris Road that went beyond the Old Dewdney Road into the Osprey Loop (in Vancouver)! My mind, then, like the bald eagle I saw there in great numbers, took off flying along the Alouette River to the wilderness – similar to jungles I walked as a teen, without a guide, exploring aimlessly, the birds and nothingness.   

Today each experience I encounter, each relationship I enter into, each insight intuitively or rationally I receive, offers me the opportunity to become stronger outwardly and grow in my inner self. I am delighted my health is in good shape. It gives me great peace to know that the invisible one who began a good work in me continues with the same that I may grow and evolve to become the person I am meant to be. I am, in fact, a work in progress that becoming.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers