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BY JOHN FITZPATRICK
A friend of mine in Australia was asked by his daughter if he was
proud of being Australian. He answered that he felt he was lucky to be
Australian. Fortunate? Yes. Pride is another notion altogether. He is
a wise man. Although he is a busy ambulance paramedic, with a small
farm in the Hunter Valley, and a good wife, and two lovely daughters,
and is a very good song writer and musician, he spends a regular
amount of time reading the Great Books and also considering life on
earth, as it is for him, and how he sees it for others.
He has an open mind and he sees and listens intently to life. He has
many reasons to be fortunate and perhaps the most enduring one is that
he has an open mind and a good heart in a land that doesn’t
dramatically inhibit these personal aspects with histories of horrific
war or overwhelming oppression. Although genetics are always a
base-substruct, an open mind and a good heart have little to do with
either nature or nurture and are achieved through experience and
reflection, and a conscious willingness to be unsure at times when
unknowingness is essential. In my experience of life and of people in
the world, I have noted that my friend is a rare man indeed.
Australia is a fortunate country for those who succeeded those who
arrived from England and Ireland in chains a couple of centuries ago.
It’s a fortunate country for many who have arrived since. It is not so
fortunate for the original people, but they had it pretty good for 40,000 years
beforehand. That’s not a bad run. Australia has a low
population, an enormous range and depth of natural resources, a human
system based in slow developmental capitalism and strong worker-union
driven socialism, with lots of space and lots of time and very few
other influences apart from... space and time. This won’t likely
change for the next hundred or two hundred years.
Asia is quite different. There has always been a struggle due to
weight of numbers, and by weight of neighbours, and the various border
incursions by one or another, and yet much more so by the invasions,
past and present, of western powers. The paraphrased words of an
Australian folk song from the seventies ring out: “If there is a
country to invade, it’s always and only because there’s a profit to be
made”.
I was born in Australia, in Sydney, and lived my young skinny white
life between the boundaries of an Irish catholic brick home, school,
friends, loves, and the boundaries of the giant blue energetic ocean
bringing in perfect waves to North Narrabeen beach. To me there is no
better surf. It’s the reliability of nature, and the natural sea-land
forms, that makes that stretch of North Shore so perfect for those
with an inclination to enter into nature in that way.
Nature is transformative. It has nothing to do with either wealth or
poverty. It is the random accident of position: of just turning up
there on the beach. In this way also I am a fortunate man. This
stretch of sea-side suburbia has been described by a Tibetan Mahayana
Buddhist monk and scholar as being representational of the way the
world of the gods basically is. I believe it. I’ve surfed it. I’ve
swallowed gallons of it. It has torn my bones from time to time as
well. It is my only true culture and I deeply respect it more than any
other I could learn here or anywhere else.
What is fortune? The open mind and the good heart; this is my guess,
and this guess is made of all I know of uncertainty, of life coming in
and out. I would still say, the best evidence of human wisdom is in
noting the elemental tides. Note the off-shore breezes, the swing of
the moment to the right, then the left, note the sigh of skies and the
empowered moon, note the impact of the dominant sun every day; and
even more than getting anything right, make sure you are ready to
enjoy the energy of the wave that comes. It may well be massive,
perfect, and only yours, only now, this once; apart from the next
billion waves that come, equally, well in the wake of both this one,
and in the wake of, and only because of, you.
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