Open Writing

It’s not often I get the chance to hold a baby, and cradling one-day-old Daniel James is an almost overwhelming experience. He’s my third grandson and has already been dubbed ‘DJ’ by the other two, who are now in their early twenties.

DJ is no doubt much like any other healthy new-born child. A wrinkled old-man’s face, and tiny fingers whose nails are already sharp enough to scratch his cheek. But for this real old man who is looking down at him, Daniel creates a rare sense of wonder. That this tiny human was such a short time ago a foetus inside its mother’s womb almost beggars belief. I am in awe of an everyday mystery that still manages to draw people to it and make them smile.

Daniel’s new life contrasts inevitably with my old one. His, I trust, will be long and ultimately rewarding, as mine has been. I’ve been fortunate and still have the ability to enjoy the many pleasures that life brings. Daniel will have a different perspective and different experiences, but there is one trait I know he shares with me.

I have been reading Anne Deveson’s semi-autobiography Resilience. It’s both a contemporary view of the qualities needed in today’s civilization, which, as Canadian economist John Raulston Saul says is ‘drifting further out into a cold, unfriendly, confusing sea’. And there’s a love story, interwoven in Anne's exploration of what resilience is all about.

Towards the end of the book, after her brief and ultimately tragic love affair with the British-born writer, speaker and futurist Robert Theobald, who died in Spokane, Anne says she had thought of resilience as ‘a quality that some people possessed and others lacked’. But she soon came to the conclusion that resilience is the life force ‘that flows and connects every living thing, continually prompting regeneration and renewal’. She cites Robert Theobald’s life and work as an example, where many people were inspired by his vision of a better world. And where she herself was touched in turn in the writing of her book.

So what is the trait that I share with my new grandson? I, having exceeded my allotted span of three score years and ten? And Daniel, having experienced already the trauma of birth? Surely we share that common quality of resilience that sees living creatures through the vicissitudes of life.

Daniel will face many challenges. He will have loving parents to guide him, close relatives and friends to help him. But ultimately he will need to source his own resilience in order to make sense of it all.

Bravo, Daniel, be true to your self.

© Alan Wheatley