Our illusory Tribe.

TV ‘Tribal Wives’. Woman, single, 40, spends month with family who have just enough of very little. She knows having, achieving and failure, and they know living. The exchange is rather one sided. I have been through that same training as the woman, of avoiding not having, avoiding not achieving and avoiding failure. I’ve been very good at it. I have, as we might say, been successful. Yet the family introduced a sort of nebulous irrelevance called living. It was repetitive, hard, simple, focused nose-to-nose contact with their daily reality. Not romantic, nor humdrum, not exciting nor boring; it was, as the mother said, “walking your life without fear.” That was the lesson the woman and I need to learn; that life is an embrace, not an arm wrestle. In effect we are ‘the have nots’ because we judge ourselves on the many elements of what we do not have, where those who have little judge themselves on what little they have. It’s exam time and thousands of youngsters are trying hard not to fail. Their teacher may invite them into the wonder and beauty of science and literature, but by being examined they learn only what’s needed to not fail. It’s an endemic state of mind that produces, wait for it, Failure, or the merest modicum of success. It becomes life without heart; a potato plant genetically modified to produce one potato as the minimum proof of what it is. Without fear of reality we make fear in all our unrealities of failure, of how we might be judged. Because of all we have we can afford to be humdrum, not romantic, boring, not exciting; we can be nose-to-nose with our own illusions. But the good news is illusions won’t kill you, only reality can do that. May you walk your life without fear.