Letters to Charles VII - Part I

Charles,

The next of my letters deals on the matter of friendship. It has been some time since I wrote you a letter, but the matter of friendship is one I have given a great deal of thought. Friendship, if you ask me, is a vitally important part of our lives, which I won’t just blurt on about it.

I will take this letter to point out the negatives and the dangers of friendship, because already, this is getting to be a long letter – just like my monumental lecture on relationships with your folks.

Before I continue any further on the subject, I will present the following statement to you:

Friendship is, for the best part, overrated.

That, dear Charles, is a very cynical statement. Why would I say such a thing? Simply because people value their friends so much that they betray themselves – their primary friend – in the process.

Friends are dangerous. Friends can make you untrue to yourself because you tend to value your friendships with people more than you value the friendship you need to have with yourself – it is, after all, a natural reaction. You know yourself, you are stuck with yourself, and therefore you have no need to keep yourself impressed with yourself. Friends, so it seems, needs to be impressed constantly – the most of them, anyway. You may retort at this stage that if I say something like this, I have never experienced true friendship. That, Charles, is to insult your self. You are a friend of mine, and I still have a hard time substantiating what you recently did for me – I don’t believe I deserved it.

Still, why do I maintain that most friends need to be impressed on a constant basis? Friendship is born from an overlap in fields of interest to use the psychological term, or common ground, to use the layman’s term. But life is a pretty dynamic thing, and so are people’s personalities. You develop in other ways, possibly losing interest in things, but for the sake of your friendship with a certain person, you hold yourself back and in the process you put the brakes on your own personal development.

Friends, dear Charles, are perennial. They come and go as the seasons. Yes, there are people who have friends for life. I counted myself among those privileged people, but recently I found that that special friendship was waning. And yes, it hurt a lot. So, understand that friendship is a great cause of heartache. Once again, you need to protect your heart in friendships. Pink Floyd, my all-time favourite band, described that protection of your heart the best to me:

Through the fish-eyed lens of tear-stained eyes
I can hardly define the shape of this moment in time
And far from flying high in clear blue skies
I’m spiraling down to this hole in the ground where I hide
If you negotiate the mine-field in the drive
And beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eyes
And if you make it past the shotguns in the hall,
Crack the combination, open the priest-hole
And even if you make it through…

I will write more on this passage in a later letter, as it had a profound impact on my life. In closing, I want to quote some of the greatest men who ever lived, who said this:

"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." – George Washington

But, also remember:

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." – CS Lewis

Until next time, pick your friends with great care.

Mr. vd M

A Brain Spasm following the news of Saddam's death sentence

The planned hanging of Saddam Hussein, in my opinion, is such a farce.

Why is he (probably) going to swing? He has been found guilty of crimes against humanity for ordering the killing of 148 in 1982, which is still a heinous act of terrorism.

However, let us consider the greatest act of terrorism in the history of the world: The atom bomb the US dropped on Nagasaki. I can still OK the one dropped on Hiroshima, as it confirmed Japan to its knees in WW2 - it was already on its knees but hey - let's give America the benefit of the doubt here.

Nagasaki was totally unacceptable and made into lab-rats the 39,000 (according to wikipedia) people killed in the blast or died as a consequence. Who swung for that? Nobody. Why wasn’t Roosevelt brought to trail for that? Because America won the war, that’s why. I believe some Japanese generals et al swung after the war for the things they did. But not the Americans, no sirree. Justice - however unjust - is delivered by the winner of the war.

I live in a third-world country and it amuses me how the world carries on. More specifically, it shocks me what the USA does. One of the most common factors of any presidential administration since WW2 is the deployment of their armed forces because somewhere, halfway around the world, something is threatening their frail national security. This is a greater commonality than, say, Democratic or Republican presidents. So, they get on their ships and they hop in their airplanes, and go and kill another 39,000 people twice every decade or so – OK, I will settle in calling that an over-exaggeration. And suffer the same number of casualties in the process – The last couple of wars didn’t go to good for the Green Coats, I understand. The amount of their casualties makes them sound like a war-addicted, cannibal nation to me. Or they may just have the knack of electing a cannibal on a regular basis...

The point is this: Saddam was convicted for senselessly killing 148. In Nagasaki 39,000 died pointlessly. So, if one Iraqi president has to swing for 148, assuming an exchange rate of one Iraqi president to one US president, which sounds fair in my books, 263.513513... US presidents must swing for Nagasaki – discounting global inflation – I will not beat around the bush any further about that.

That makes me wonder about dictatorship. The cheers resounded all around the world when Saddam was ousted. But still the world, maybe without realising it, willingly bows down to the greatest dictator of them all every day – The USA. Will the cheers be heard the day this dictator falls, or will the rest of the world be forced to listen to the pathetic wailing of this once great nation for the injustices it so unfairly was made to suffer as we did on 9/11 or when Katrina and Rita struck?

So, on the day Saddam swings, let us hope there is another 263 nooses – the Americans had better get voting. And let’s not forget the nooses reserved for Russian presidents, compliments of Mr. Stalin. Or the number of nooses reserved for South African presidents, compliments of the Apartheid regime. The list goes on...

Lessons from SCUBA diving

This is the first of some postings I hope to write about the things I have learnt from SCUBA diving.

I had quite an interesting discussion with my brother the other day about the subject and why I don't appear to see as much as he sees when diving. The conclusion I reached is that I tend to look at things at the macroscopic level: I tend to look out for the big things - sharks, dolphins, rays, etc. He, on the other hand tends to look at the microscopic level: He keeps a sharp eye out for the nudibranchs, paperfish and things normally camouflaged.

This past weekend I have been diving at Ponta Malongane in Southern Mozambique - some of the best diving I ever did.

I decided to follow his approach and to re-evaluate my way of diving - and I conclude that I don't look at the macroscopic level. Far worse, I tend to look at holistic level. I try to see the whole picture - which I succeed in - but I do not understand what I see. The reason for that is that I do not understand or fully appreciate the full spectrum of everything I see.

So, what did I do? I emptied my BCD and got a bit closer to the reef. Sure, I still did not see everything there is to see, because when looking at a microscopic level, you will miss some of the big stuff. But in time, you will see everything there is to see. And from there, you can start stepping back and try to see the whole of a reef.

Such, my friends, is life. You need to zoom in on some things, the things that make up the whole. Then you can put some air in your BCD, hover a bit higher and then, when you are peacefully drifting over the Great Reef that is life, will you understand the parts of the whole, and see the whole for what it really is.