Mission or Meaning

When I was about 9, feeling miserable and lonely due to family secrets and betrayal, as I sensed them then and came to understand them later,

while fortunately having been spared any religious education I would have had to dismantle later intellectually anyway, I had what I came to understand 30 years later as a transpersonal experience – reassuring for all my life but still leaving hard work to keep it alive and guiding me. (See Haibun Cobbles on this blog)

When my conscience awoke with intellectual curiosity around the age of 14 or 15, I began to read philosopher Arno Plack https://second.wiki/wiki/arno_plack and other material that led me to look at painful paradoxes through the lens of mystery.

Around 16, when desperate to fit in (never worked!), I turned away from my live sense of benevolent mystery (did not work either, really) which left me rather lonely inside, until I found a way back in my early thirties.

With a combination of high sensitivity, eccentricity, good thinking skills and stubbornness, my early professional life was not easy – it did not help that I found pretence and hidden agendas intolerable. Yet, I survived, both on my sense of meaning and the expectation that I would work out what my mission in life was, eventually.

The latter came to pass just after I had turned 50, at the end of a research sabbatical.http://www.beaconsocialcare.org.uk

My emphasis for Social Justice over convenience kept me curious and adventurous.

I discovered the connection of these interests as a Social Worker: Using empathy with individuals for creative pragmatic solutions while walking the tight rope of Advocacy vs Local Authority (as professional guidelines demand) as employer. Utterly enjoyable if exhausting.

Retirement now, while some of those interests remain, seems to be a time to tie my sensitivity and curiosity together – in creative writing, embody it.

What else may be to come?…