A Traveller's Guide to the Journey

All Journeys have to have a beginning and life is no exception. One day you were in a place that was warm, comfortable, dark and a bit cramped, but basically safe. Then after a lot of noise and pushing, you found yourself in a much more spacious place, but the lights were blinding, the temperature was up and down all the time, and people kept poking at you. You won't remember any of it, of course, but that was the first day of your life as an independent person, the day of your birth. The circumstances of your birth may have affected you deeply. Were you born rich or poor? Did you have a physical affliction that you either got over or is still with you? Were you born one gender and either think you should have been or wish you were, born the other (be thankful there are only two)? Were you discarded or nearly discarded shortly after your birth? We'll get to that part of your Journey later; I am thinking of a beginning that is earlier than that. Depending on your viewpoint, your life actually started around nine months (or maybe significantly less for some of you) before your birth. At the moment your father's sperm fertilised your mother's egg, something magical happened, and the process of creating your body began. Some of you believe you became a person at that point also, but leaving that aside, at the very least this represents another beginning of life for you. So did the circumstances of your conception have any bearing on you at all? You may have been born of a loving, committed relationship between two wonderful people, but perhaps you think of yourself as a product of less than favourable conditions in that regard. Maybe a rape was involved, or maybe you were just a child born to fulfil the requirement for an heir. Some people think of themselves as just a drunken accident. “I am a bottle of whisky,” I have heard one person say. The possibility even exists these days that you were the result of an anonymous donation of sperm. As tragic as some of this may seem, we are not at this point of the Journey yet because we are still not at the beginning I am looking for. Even before your birth, circumstances were afoot that were going to affect your future. That conception was never going to take place unless a man and a woman came together. What sort of people were they? What sort of families did they have? What were their attitudes to having children? Believe it or not, that comment about being a twinkle in your mother and father's eyes has more meaning that we give it credit for. In a sense you existed before you existed. People were thinking about you before there was a you to think about. Did your mother and father desperately want a child, and were delighted when you arrived, or were you just an enormous inconvenience? Perhaps the requirement for an heir meant that grandparents were planning for your arrival long before even the birth of their own children! People yearning for grandchildren sometimes put enormous pressure on their children to have children. Even here, though, we are still way past the beginning I am thinking of. We need to go back as far in time as we can go to a place that is no longer accessible to us in the usual sense. Your Journey starts under a Tree. In many ways it is just an ordinary tree in an ordinary setting - a Garden. It is bearing fruit, and you are looking up at the fruit through the eyes of your greatest possible grandparents. It is here in this place and this time that your Journey begins with a choice. This choice has echoed through the corridors of time ever since and affects everything you say, everything you are and everything you do. The choice is to do with ownership. Not the ownership of the fruit on this Tree, but the ownership of yourself. The choice that was made that day was a choice of independence - I can do it on my own, I don't need an owner. A man called Adam and a woman called Eve decided that day that they wanted to be owners of their own destiny - to be filled with knowledge and wisdom that would make them independent of God - and they sealed your fate as much as their own. Because of their choice, you are faced with a life of independence because they were cast out into the world you now live in. It's no point blaming God for kicking them out of the Garden. What they did made the Garden unable to contain them any longer. This wasn't because the Garden had changed, but because they had changed. So now, you and I and the whole of the rest of the human race begin our Journeys standing outside of that Garden and looking in. Now, all of the other `beginnings' I have mentioned begin to fall into place. Why do people allow a child to suffer the agonies of being discarded at birth, raised by the kindness or otherwise of strangers, never knowing where they had come from? Why does a man force himself on a woman not caring about the consequences to her body or her soul, not to mention the creation of a child? Why do people put their own needs and desires before others and put pressure on wives and children and even grandchildren to produce an heir for them? Independence. They believe that they possess their own destinies and that is what matters. Other people become secondary considerations. Consequences become irrelevant. Life becomes a parade that everyone else dances for them.