getting real, - getting older - seeing through the game

Only caged dogs bark.... 

- Tengra Ngiam

I read this yesterday:

for easier reading -click on the picture to see it full size

It comes from the book  A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East
by Tiziano Terzani.  

As I get older there is a kind of liberation. 

Not the angry young man's liberation, 

But the liberation from self imposed restrictions and rules. 

Finally I see that so much of what I've bought into is not worth the effort. 

There are other ways. 

Most of it smoke and mirrors and  bluff, - bluff as in poker-bluff. 

Once you dare to call the bluff you laugh at yourself,

because the point was for me to find the courage to call the bluff. Break the hypnotic gaze of those imagined 'should's' and shouldn't 's. 

The challenges and the fears are all internal. Conquer those and the rest is half done. 

Why all this carry on ? 

Why all this smoke and mirrors when I was younger ?

I got upset. 

Then I realized: it was part of the game.

You are young, you are naive, you believe stuff they tell you.... 

And then you fight your way back to your own truth. 

It reminds me of those initiation rites: they drop you in the middel of the jungle with a compass and a knife and one other item of your choice. 

Can you find your way back ?

They drop you in childhood, with only the still quiet voice of your own heart and a jungle of distrations - to see how long it takes you to get back 'home'. :-) 

The dogs bark, but the Caravan moves on....
Old Arab proverb. 

I never met Tiziano, I only met him in his book. 

But I did meet the Surgeon Dr Naga  in Burma (Myanmar).

As punishment for his outpokeness Dr Naga was transferred to a hospital in the Naga hill, which was not used much.
         None of the local people went to hospitals, despite their need for medical help. This was in the 1960's

So Dr Naga walked  to the villages where the people lived.
He often dressed like them and walked all over Nagaland, operating on those who had real problems.

He performed surgery in the Nagaland hills using only a local anaesthetics.

           He operated on his patients while they were conscious and obtained useful feedback from them during the operation. He would ask his patients to sing or speak while he operated, both to help them and to assist his surgery.

           He walked from village to village performing many goiter operations, removing 'bumps and lumps'. This is his story starting 1965.

Dr Naga turned no one away for lack of money or payment.

He refused to take payment from those he helped. He simply did his job. He had enough to live and work and do his work.His story is here https://sites.google.com/site/ambulatorysurgerymyanmar

.........someone who found his way back home. 

Background 

• About Tiziano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiziano_Terzani
• About Dr Naga https://sites.google.com/site/ambulatorysurgerymyanmar/   and   https://www.createspace.com/3546913

what young dogs think - they're old so it doesn't matter

Sitting in the Creperie Restaurant last night (17Mar11) I couldn't help over hearing the table next to me. The volume and the proximity made it hard to concentrate. 

"They're old anyway, so it doesn't matter. They can go and do whatever, go anywhere." 

The young man was talking very enthusiastically to a young Vietnamese lady

It reminded me of myself in my younger days. 

I thought that older people would have less fears because after all they're older, there is MUCH less to lose, isn't there ? 

I mean, why worry, they're going to die soon anyway, so they can really cut lose and enjoy life, can't they ? 

They would not be so scared of life like me. Not so overly cautious would they ? 

I really did think something like that once, in my (more) naive youth. 

How wrong can you be ? 

Ha ha ha.... 

Would be nice. If only. 

I remember reading in the New Scientist (?  or somewhere like that) that bees and ants send the older bees out further from the hive, on the more dangerous missions, because they were more expendable. They had less working life to contribute to the hive. (Well ok, this is what the scientists THINK the bees are doing, I've not asked the bees). 

Now that I'm over 50 (what ME, over 50 ? I thought getting older only happens to others. Never to ME!) 

Let's try again: NOW THAT I"M OVER 50! 

I see that the opposite is true. As we get older we get more cautious, more afraid. 

Less adventurous, less passionate. 

There are exceptions. 

NB: I even saved that web-page about older bees going on the riskier missions on my hard drive, but can't find it now.... anyone has a copy ? 
FOUND IT: its not bees, its ants: http://www.critterzone.com/magazineresource/ants-communication-organization-behavior.htm
Let me quote a small bit from it:

In many ant species, younger workers spend their time at the center of the nest where it's safest, tending to the queen and eggs. As the ants age, they take up tasks further out. The oldest ants carry out the most dangerous work, foraging for food outside the nest where they are more likely to meet their doom. However, it has been determined that in many ants, the correlation between age and task is not so strong, where the division of labor is quite flexible. Age may influence what a worker does, but they may revert to old tasks if needed. Therefore, age isn't the organizing principle in division of labor for many species.

I wouldn't be surprised if something like that applies to bees  too.

Humans do something like that too. In an emergency it is 'women and children first' at least that is what the movies tell us when a ship goes down. I like think it would really happen like that. I like to think I would follow that rule if it ever came to it.