It’s complicated. Such is the social media shorthand for conveying certain factors in a relationship are far from perfect without having to go into tricky explanations. ‘It’s personal’ is another — which is code for ‘mind your own bloody business’.
This brief article is complicated and personal. Harrowing to write for these reasons, it ranges over two matters that are core to my own journey and close to my heart. I rarely mention either — even to close friends and family. Yet they constantly haunt my more reflective moments. Both are about the long now of time experienced over an individual lifetime and over generations…
I have always found intimate relationships crucial, particularly in terms of mutual support during tough times, yet extremely difficult to sustain. Seldom do I envy couples who have been together for decades, though there are some notable exceptions. My niece Debbie Cameron and her husband Roger, for example, have been married for 38 years – or more. That’s not especially long in the grand scheme of things. Even so, it has given them a heartfelt sense of empathy and tolerance, each for the other, within a framework of enduring love that is increasingly uncommon.
Obviously people in prolonged relationships share a treasure chest of experiences — photographs, letters, music, and artefacts marking a journey that is unique to them. They watch with awe and fascination as their children are born, grow up, and have their own offspring. They navigate life’s glitches and surprises as best they can. Each year they venture on holiday together, sometimes to new and exotic locations, but often to old hangouts to which they return again and again. This happens to be the Maldives in the case of Debbie and Roger. And when old age eventually creeps up on them, they accept any physical shortcomings with a gracious nonchalance.
Sometimes I feel a sense of longing — not for the rite of passage itself, not for the variety of emotional interactions, nor the many ups and downs that punctuate each lifespan, and not for the disruptions that threaten to tear at the fabric of each marriage at some stage. What I miss is the uninterrupted relational continuity and empathy that comes through a life partnership.
My mother, now deceased, was the sole witness to the first forty years of my life as a drama stretching over two acts, though my oldest friend Peter had far more than just a minor role from the end of the first act to this day. In a marriage lasting 23 years, my first wife was the co-author in the second of those acts. My subsequent partnership with Elizabeth resulted in the writing of a third act, a most joyful drama which ended prematurely after a miscarriage while on holiday in Rajasthan. A fourth act – almost an extended travel documentary – still stumbles along in a state of separation. But out of yet another heartbreak, an event too bewildering to dwell on, the fourth, and presumably, final act was conjured.
In terms of the continuous flow of life’s experience then, my mother, together with my friend Peter, then Valerie, Elizabeth, Suna – my wife of 18 years – and now Khwanchit, had only parts of the panorama in which I was the lead actor. Although the curtain has yet to descend on the final act, none of the actors had or have complete knowledge of how the plot actually unfolded from one moment to the next.
They had glimpses of the action, of course. But Valerie never heard me perform my final organ recital at Notre Dame in Paris when I was 22 years old. My mother did not meet her last nine grandchildren. Peter could not attend the world premiere of my fiendishly difficult solo percussion work Quete in Sydney a few years ago. Elizabeth did not meet my eldest son’s children. Suna has little comprehension of the scope of my career. Khwanchit even less so, given that she is reluctant to ever venture outside of Thailand. The only witness to the complete drama is me. Everything other than my own life experience is open to misinterpretation. Even my own memories, of course, though possibly extremely creative, are flawed.
As it is with couples, so it is with the human species. If we were able to take that living panorama of a single life, any life, and project it back in time, we would reveal lost information. If we had the power to do this collectively, we would eventually unlock wisdom. Of course, with the rate of today’s technological development, we might be able to do just that by the year 2045 — the year of the projected singularity as proposed by Ray Kurzweil. Just picture having the whole of one’s life, including the numerous details, decisions, dalliances, and distractions, available in the Cloud. Imagine being able to pause and hit the replay button!
But technology does not particularly motivate me. What intrigues me, even more than the wildest technocratic dreams, is the prospect of “rewilding” barren lands, partially with extinct species that, taken out of the food chain centuries ago, precipitated many of the biospheric problems we now face. Of helping to steward more wisely the “more-than-human” world. And of learning from history. How wonderful it would be if we could access the vast repertoire of indigenous wisdom from ages long past — learning from those who have been watching and caring for humanity and its evolution for many thousands of years and whose decisions were intended to stand for generations.
Just today my friend Dr Deon Van Wyk, telling me about the work he is doing with indigenous healers to bring their voice into the climate change debate, made it clear that the current pandemic disrupting our world is no surprise to aboriginal elders who have been watching us closely for 250,000 years. Bushmen of the Kalahari have known, since colonial times, that Western society has far more power than it can handle. The Huni Kuin of the Amazon refer to Western civilisation as the younger brother, replete with hubristic impulses, in their ceremonies.
So how might we consider expressions of time differently? How can we step into different epistemologies by noticing more about both our granular and flow experiences with time? The expanded now of human awareness, stretching back in time and forward into the future, should be the canvas for any discussions about human progress and where to go from here. But that requires humility. And I am not at all sure that we have the maturity we need in order to retrieve such an elusive quality.
When people ask me about the future, my response is always the same. I say I have no idea what an ideal society might look like, but it must work for everyone rather than just a few. We will need leadership, but not of the kind we have subjected society to today. We will need governance, but not of the kind that is corruptible and that enables just a few people to become more affluent than the rest. We will need empathy to eradicate the erroneous notion that we are somehow separate from each other and from nature. And we will need a leap of consciousness so that we can solve our problems in ways that endure for generations to come.