The Meaning of Things.

Happy to be back in Mali again. To stay with Eva at the lovely Swedish  residence feels like coming home: so many important events have unfolded here over the last few years. Bamako is pleasant now, neither sweltering hot, nor has the cool period started. I swim in the pool every day and spend most of my time wrestling with administrative details, trying to organize the upcoming  trip to Djenne and Timbuktu.

Today I met Berit, the charming wife of the new Norwegian ambassador to Mali. She has been 
reading this journal, and also the old one Djenne Djenno, and she wanted to meet me so she kindly invited me for lunch in Bamako today. Between starter and main course the conversation took a   philosophical turn...

I have always been an inveterate searcher for the Meaning of Things, with a feeling that  the events that pass by us, or involve us are somehow invested with Meanings that we are supposed to discover, decipher and use as material to form our life.

Berit was not of the opinion that there are Meanings to what happens. ‘Shit Happens’, she accurately pronounced. Yes, I know.  All that happens is  not positive and rosy and all cannot  be construed to be working for our good. I know that I could not even begin this conversation with someone whose son had just died in a car accident. She said that she was not a believer. But I don’t think one needs to be religious to believe that there is a sort of mysterious pattern and purpose to what happens to us.  

“ I don’t mean that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds in some sort of optimistic and delusionary vision of reality”, I said.  Berit probably  meant that to think there is a pattern and a Meaning to things entails a fatalistic passivity: that one is off the hook and one can sit down and wait for it all to happen, like some spectator at a show. One is not  responsible. The events are simply unfolding. But that is not what I mean.

I think of the river again. The river flows by us, fast sometimes and slower sometimes. It is filled with flotsam. All of it Means something, in eternal and infinite combinations. Some of it is meant for us, some of it has nothing to do with us, but is meant for others. We have to try and decipher what belongs to us, and make something out of it. To let it all float by without grasping hold of any of it is to waste it. We will  make mistakes and misunderstand...it is a risky business. But to believe in Meanings and Reasons is not a passive thing, sitting down waiting for things to happen, it is to use the flotsam from the river as it is floating by, and having a hand in shaping one’s destiny.
The action of writing a journal for the last eleven years has has not only recorded events, it has helped to shape my life, because in the choosing of what is recorded and what is discarded one builds structures from all this fast flowing flotsam and continually attempt to grasp and even shape  the Meaning of Things...

Berit works for a human rights organization in Norway. She has taken some time off now to enjoy Mali.  I think in the end we agreed that it is our response and our reactions to what happens to us that is the important ingredient in  the Meaning of Things. In that we form our destiny. And there must be plenty of movement , hope and creative possibilities  in that.

This reminds me of something lovely I read the other day:

Without hope there can be no endeavour…it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded ; for hope itself is happiness and its frustrations, however frequent, are less dreadful than its extinction. Samuel Johnson on DonQuixote, The Rambler, (1750)

An auspicious lunchtime conversation with a new friend. I am sure it means something...