We are all just people on a mountain

By N.Gonsalves | Neil gets critically introspective and shares his views on how vicarious learning, while mentally taxing offers our best option for mutual respect.

Written by Neil Gonsalves for Seeking Veritas on Substack

Photo by Evangeline Shaw on Unsplash

Unapologetically Me

Have you ever known a person who spends a lot of time living in their head? A person lost somewhere between being a dreamer and being a loner. People like that exist and other people either want to save them or outright avoid them. - I am one of those people and I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember.

There is a perpetual push and pull, fuelled by curiosity, always raging in my mind. It makes me a tired restless soul but it also satiates the creative misfit within, and that’s a beast I’m not ready to abandon yet. To me the world is a complex puzzle, an enigma wrapped in a riddle surrounded by a mystery. There are clues everywhere I look waiting to be discovered, patterns and contradictions to be decoded, multiple perspectives to consider, knowledge to be imbibed, and wisdom to acquire.

I have been criticized for failing to appreciate the simple things and I’m routinely reminded of my frequently expressed disdain for the mundane. These are charges I cannot easily dismiss, there is reliable record of my rants on the subject! I am after all that person who responds “thank-you”, when referred to as a disrupter or a constructive deviant. Some have cautioned that those are not compliments but the badges offered to the expendables, the useful idiots who challenge the status quo in the service of a greater good only to be forgotten as a foot note lost in history. The credit for fixing the broken status quo laid bare by the expendable usually goes to the charismatic orator in the fine suit. That does not bother me much.

I’m more interested in the lessons from history than the unending cast of characters who occupy the limelight for a fraction a second in the grand scale of time. It is only the lessons that may prevent us from repeating the errors of the past. The folly of hubris is fairly consistent and well documented across time and space, they provide satisfactory explanations for most human foibles and failures. If only we were more committed to open dialogue and vicarious learning available from the past, we may more readily discover our capacity for empathy, mutual respect and perhaps even that elusive truth always lingering on the horizon.

The Tyranny of the Minority

A significant amount of ink has been spilled on the subject of polarization in 2024, although it’s hardly a new topic. A lot has been said about the people on the far left being hyper-WOKE and people on the far right being ethnocentric. We did a retro-rewind and saw arguments in favour of segregation - sorry, affinity groups having safe spaces to only socialize with similarly pigmented individuals. Earlier in the year the anti-woke squad put some points up on the board when black Jesus, (no not Michael Jordan) had his anti-racist centre in Boston get bad press for its poor management and underperformance. But the woke finished strong in Canada with a proposal to amend federal law to consider black people distinct and separate from other people of colour - Separate but equal I’m sure!

We saw some gay men being pushed out of the LGBTQ ally group because their positionality overlapped with being white and male; never mind that they were previously criminalized merely for who they loved or were attracted to (they sometimes liked sex without love! GASP! What heathens, heterosexuals would never do that… Wait! ).

Society took on the feminists who demonstrated their bigotry when asserting that a woman couldn’t have a penis. We also added to the inclusive lexicon with terms like birthing people, chest feeders, and menstrual equity. Not to be out done the race essentialist coined the term white-adjacent to clearly distinguish between the equity-deserving and the un-deserving, I presume.

We saw protests about schools notifying parents about issues related to their children who are minors. The argument, parents are potentially dangerous and often don’t provide safe spaces for their own children who may be questioning their sexuality. The solution, confiding in school teachers about important stages of psycho-sexual development. What could go wrong with keeping secrets from family and trusting government run schools to decide the best interest of children?

I even heard an unverified rumour that we may amend the age Canadian children can legally emancipate themselves from their parents from 16 to 12. The parents/guardians will still be financial responsible for the emancipated minor but the local school boards will provide a safe space to validate the experience. (I’m not confirming the validity of that rumour but you should thank post-modernism if you are unclear on the objective reality here)

We saw impassioned protests about 70+ year old regional conflicts on the other side of the world, from a lot of people who know nothing about Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, or any lessons that could be gleaned from that accord struck in Oslo, overseen by Slick Willy, you know, before we became more interested in the blowjobs he received under that fine desk made from the timbers of the British ship, the H.M.S. Resolute. That gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 has seen a lot! Although in all fairness I’m not sure how many of those protestors would know what shaped room houses that desk - Ironically they could probably name the person who gave that blowjob, if only they could understand the contents of this paragraph.

I will leave the recap at the tip of the iceberg, suffice it to say the rest of the year offered a lot more that could have made the highlight reel. Now if only we took a moment to recognize that social media and that which is trending over represents the margins, we would realize that most of us are situated somewhere in the middle of that ideological spectrum. So while the VERY vocal minority dominates the poles, there is a lot of space for us to find common humanity, shared purpose, mutual respect and community among the silent majority.

Seeking Veritas

We are all so caught up in our own lives, our own ideals, our own tribes, that we don’t recognize when we ourselves become dogmatic, pious, and ideologically rigid. We are all guilty of it at times, because we are all human. Therein lies the answer to our problem, we are all human, including those we disagree with.

I once visited a Sikh gurdwara and spoke with a gyani about belief. He shared a metaphor with me that has stuck with me for decades and helped me find common ground in the most unlikely spaces. Allow me to share it with you;

He described life and by extension our world like a mountain. On every side of the mountain there are people who speak different languages, they share different mythologies that are designed to help their young learn ancient wisdom, they practice different rituals, use different symbols and work diligently towards living their best lives. The peak of the mountain represents the final destination, atop awaits a higher purpose, some call it God, others Allah, Yahweh, Elohim, Brahma, Shiva or Vishnu, others still think of it as Nirvana or the purpose of a life well lived.

Along the way to that final destination, many seems to be trying to live their best lives and be the best person they can be. All of them making mistakes, falling short, and trying again and again. - The only problem is that the mountain is so big that we often don’t see the people on the other side. We sometimes fail to recognize that the people we can’t seem to understand on the other side are actually working towards the same purpose, with similar conviction; only they are speaking in another language, using different symbols, rituals and metaphors to communicate amongst each other about that which is ineffable to us all.

Maybe we would all benefit from seeing others as just humans on the same cosmic journey. It may require us to be open to listening, open to learning, open to understanding, maybe even open to disagreeing. Or perhaps we just simply need to be open to those on “the other side” of the mountain. Perhaps we should remember that bad habit we all have, the tendency to judge others by their actions but ourselves by our intentions.

Sometimes my search for the contemporary Rosetta Stone has contributed to my restlessness, more often it has fuelled my curiosity and energized my creativity. I hope 2024 brings us closer to appreciating our common humanity; I hope it allows us to share ideas and respect each other even when we disagree, so that we may better understand each other, better listen to each other, and better communicate with each other. Here’s to finding more common ground in 2024.

Whether you are a restless soul, a creative misfit or somewhere in between, I wish you a Happy New Year!

About the author: Neil Gonsalves is an Indian-born Canadian immigrant who grew up in Dubai, U.A.E. and moved to Canada in 1995. He is an Ontario college educator, a TEDx speaker, an author and columnist, a recreational dog trainer and an advocate for new immigrant integration and viewpoint diversity.