Narrowing The Focus

You start with eyes wide open, the whole vista in front of you. Horizon to zenith, east to west, taking it all in.

And so, so much to take in.

Wherever you look there are pompous, pretentious, prattling pseudo-leaders, gesticulating at an engineered foe, stirring sound bites into nationalism and hatred of ‘the other’.

Whatever generates the spotlight moment, whatever the lie, half-truth, distortion, just as long as they are at the front of the public awareness.

And the memory is short, or uncaring, and the shoulders shrug at regular and repeated outrages against honesty, truth, fairness, justice, everything that makes us humanitarians.

So you narrow the focus, down to just our shores, but the picture gets no better.

The xenophobia is rife, the separation between groups, and from the truth, widens and deepens, and personal agenda rules over the needs of the vast majority.

There is no-one left to raise a calming hand and call for a pause, a breath, a moment of reflection. The rush is on to win the race, any race, as long as the instigators of chaos win.

And so I narrow my focus even further, and look at those around me, in the small circle that holds those I care about.

And, at last, I can see what is missing from the wide vistas.

I see astonishing people doing astonishing things. Adjusting their bases to include wider geographical options; rationalising a short-term separation against the long-term advantages it will bring; absorbing the awesome of far-flung places and returning the same – thankfully – but enriched; terrifying with an astute intelligence at less than 3; and emerging from consecutive and concurrent trials, and recovering and reinventing and reinventing a world that will work for them – and for those that occupy or enter the circle.

There are so many more, each with a light, and each as astonishing as the others.

And I retain my focus there, because that is where reality is, and where the resolutions will emerge.

In time.