Three scores and scoring

More than a year after purchasing my pick-up, I finally got a vehicle registration tag. It reads: ACE 160. How right on target! It is the month of August of the current era, first day, and I am celebrating the 10th year anniversary of my membership to AARP.

Just when I wailed myself into Gaia’s biosphere in a bamboo hut at some agrarian unrest outpost in the central plains of the Philippines, a B-29 bomber crew in Tinian received for the first time the newly constituted uranium-based Little Boy atomic bomb. Improved sibling to the prototype that blasted the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert a few weeks back, it would be flown over Hiroshima six days later by the just named bomber Enola Gay, the pilot mother’s appellation. The impact it left behind ushered a flash of eternity. The rest is history for Little Boy, my twin brother.

This telling will probably be “more than we really need to know,” as aptly put by a commentator to a previous narration that was up close and personal, but never the mind. This other little boy journeyed in a different direction from that of his Tinian sibling. There is scant historical record that indicates a destructive path was this one’s chosen way. On the contrary, this little boy has been called numerous labels, the most frequent of which is the noun “traitor” first used for opposing the Vietnam War. More recently, the adjective “unpatriotic” was used for its unwavering opposition to war as an instrument of furthering foreign policy, e.g. the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a nation’s relentless pursuit of oil and the obsession to control its use.

The journey has reached three scores. What has transpired in that period has been an explosion of a different sort. Mine has been a physical outburst of energy that took this once fragile frame into the wilds of Brazil to the tundra by the Berring Straits. It dwelled in the urban northside of Chicago to tenement hovels in Ship Kip Mei, Kowloon; from Buddhist wood block sounds in Seoul’s Nak Bon Dong to the Muslim minaret calls by the murky waters of West Africa’s Lake Lagos; from Maliwada in the shadows of the Ellora caves of Maharastra to the albatross populated South Island’s Dunedin in Kiwi land.

The number of visits of varied locales is equaled by the numerous internal eruptions that formed a wildly passionate heart, and carved a mosaic from diverse intellectual traditions housed in a multifaceted interior castle of multiple intelligences. Now, that’s a mouthful, an ear-full, and some. The point is, if the Little Boy flared its fame into the annals of human history, this little boy plodded through the evolutionary creation of selfhood and self-consciousness in small outbursts of meaningful encounters and human learning, gleaning the wisdom learned in the history-wide panorama of homo sapiens’ trek to be shared at this time with sixth graders in the Public School System. Not as a tourist but as an indwelling traveler without traces of Napoleonic megalomania, we’ve so far left our footprints in six of today’s eight continents.

When orchestrating any human event, I use four holding categories to guide narrative. These four dimensions are: time, space, role and story. Using the same in the accounting for a life, to map this little boy’s journey, the odyssey would spin this way.

My personal time is a covenant of four scores and six. My genetics favors even a longer time span, and in a period when the centenary mark is easily and often breached, managing longevity of twice the expected life span of our not too distant ancestors is not a major feat. But I opt for full personal responsibility of 86 years of shelf life, sans illusions that it is lived in preparation of another existence elsewhere later. Any time extension is icing on the cake. One e-mail address I have consistently used in the last 10 years bears the number 2031, circa terminus. I discovered long time ago that even in the din of the social beehive, I lunged into life alone, live my individual glorious moment of life as “one, unique, unrepeatable gift of life into human history,” and alone, die this spark of existence in the awe-filled journey of consciousness. To be a human being is to know one’s self as a solitary. To name the destination is to embrace death as a friend rather than as a foe.

My life’s context, however, is worldwide and history-long. My mind journeys the gamut of memories from the bipods in the African savannas, to the makers of artificial intelligences (AI)—explorers of the planet and distant skies, on the one hand, and navigators of internal depth and interior space on the other. The scope of my citizenship is global. My nationalistic impulses have given way to planetary loyalty. I see a signing of the Declaration of Interdependence in 2045 to celebrate the centennial year of the United Nations. Loving the Earth is my mantra.

If my care is global, my passion is local; if my mind wanders the corridors of geopolitical powers and the aftermaths of 9/11s and 7/7s, my heart this decade will share man’amko moments in the NMI. A global vision is only as good as the efficacy of its local mission. The roles we play are chosen from images of exemplars that abound in the relics and residues of our cultures. The south Asian Indian maps a human journey in four lifetime dances. The first is one of experimentation and playful adventure. The next sways to the wild gyrations of creation. The third marches on the steady, disciplined and establishing processes of structure and system building. Finally, the fourth marks the sage of imaginal wisdom, depository of accumulated learning. Four phases, one lifetime; four scores complete a journey. My exemplars include the Samurai and Don Quixote; the Monastics with names like Francis, Aquinas, Luther in the shadow long cast by the Galilean who said, “this is my body that is given for you.” I ruminate with Australasian aboriginal elders into the cogitation of the secular saints of our time, and many pedagogues in between. I have self-consciously worn the sheath of the warrior and the pen of the poet, the apron of the servant and the mantle of the sage. Those are the roles I keep and in their steps I continue to dance the gift of life.

My story, yes; this is mine. Sometimes encapsulated into a written credo, at other times, a photo montage; at once, a powerful and playful phrase, at others, a crescending wind chime fluttering among the doves diving into the bamboo groves. Would that Dr. Seuss had not written Happy Birthday To You and You Only Are Old Once, but my plume is not that sharp. I do sing the same praises. For now, ACE 160 tags me, compliments of the BMV. Now, this telling will be read as just another instance of narcissistic display. Nah, nah, nah. It aims to ask the only question worth asking on someone’s birthday: What is your story?

If three scores and still scoring leaves a smirk in my Tinian lawyer friend’s face, that’s her problem. Got Monty Python XXVI annums more to go, and counting. Intend to strew blessedness and grace in them trails, and the remaining odyssey, littered with peace-filled encounters.