Reconciling with Passing

Transcript:- Show me a person who is beautiful and vibrant, who lives life like there is no tomorrow and who loves his enemies as passionately as he does his friends and I will show you a fellow who has reconciled with the idea of Passing. Death for him is no longer ‘conceptual’ but a ‘reality’. Death for him is the elephant in the room and it is black, it is blue and it is beautiful.

Reconciling with Passing is the keystone that opens the door to the contentious Birth-Evolution construct where ego and pride clash and strive for pole position. Simply put, the ideology once infused in the psyche becomes the device that evacuates the false pride of material wealth and conversely, the earlier the construct is infused, the more vibrant the life that lives it.

The thing is, this essential device is consigned to taboo status in most societies and is kept away from the adolescent who conceptualizes the construct only when he gains his faculties and migrates the 'concept’ to ‘reality’ only towards the end of his tether; at which point, the elderly fellow transforms into a beautiful, vibrant and rancor-less being who wishes to live life like there is no tomorrow and to love his enemies as passionately as he does his friends.

My reference is Bill, a World War II veteran, who served the US Air Force in the closing chapter of the war with Japan. He was invited to Hiroshima for one of its memorials. It was the first time he stepped unto Japanese soil. He realized he represented the country that incinerated two Japanese cities, the fallout of which is still felt in health complications of the elderly and newborns alike.

On the second visit he found himself in a bar in downtown Nagasaki. He did not expect the warmth and adulation he received. He asked for an explanation. He wanted to know why would they treat someone who represented a nation that flattened their beautiful city to rubble just 6 decades ago, with no rancor. He choked on his beer when a smiling but tipsy octogenarian said, the capacity to forgive is a crucial element of influence you pass down to descendants, a rehabilitated memory is and will not become an expunged memory. The aged Japanese said, he drinks to physically compensate a debilitating motor reaction caused by the atomic fallout and that it is his attitude, not rhetoric, that communicates his real intention because his words would lose potency otherwise, in particular if his intention is to defeat his guest. Bill choked on his beer again. He found the octogenarian livid and firing on all cylinders but with one crucial element that ought to ‘naturally’ flow from his experience absent - rancor.

How did his Japanese friend isolate ‘resentment’ of someone who represented a country that incinerated his place of abode? His explanation is that the ideology of Passing, inculcated in him at birth, enables him enough Good Character to transform from enemy to a pragmatic ally with stoicism and ease. His culture demands through a common sense dictum of a Zen-Shinto ethic, which states that communication in whatever form is not dependent on rhetoric but upon emotion, attitude and character that conveys it.

On the macro, Japan has been replete with destruction, re-birth and re-construction. In the recent past, Tokyo was destroyed followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within decades the cities were re-born and the on-going re-construction of Sendai, ravaged by a tsunami recently, will go linear in similar fashion. On the apparency, pragmatism and industry mixed with a dose of tenacity are key features of a dynamic society but the 'reality' of Passing in the micro is what enables the features in the macro.

Reconciling with Passing is the keystone that directs the brief stint called life. Remove the keystone and life becomes a rudderless journey of wasted emotions, ego and pride.

Words, Videography - Tommy Peters

(The animation was created in Xtranormal)