I’d like to
start with a quote form Zora Neale Hurston; love is like the sea – it takes its
shape from the shores it meets. As every person is different so every
relationship is different.
I’d like to
say a few things about dad and how his uniqueness shaped our relationships with
him
I spent some
time thinking about which memories of dad I should share with you all here, and
there are many happy ones, so it was no easy task. I finally hit on a time the
family were up Twyford down at a big protest against the road being built
there. In a rare occurrence dad ran into someone he knew who was clearly from a
very different walk of life than dad’s. He was a bearded hippy type about ten
or twenty years younger and quite a bit more ‘salt of the earth’ than dad was.
I’m not sure how they knew each other but I think it was form some kind of
Green Spirit type group. Dad once told me that he didn’t know how to make small
talk but on that occasion he did and it was very sweet to watch, the man asked
him what he was up to and dad replied that he was going to Argentina for a conference
on gravity, the man replied that that was brilliant and was he going to talk
about the gravitational influence of stars on our lives. What I like about the
encounter is that I saw the rather lovely way dad handled a conversation with
someone quite difference from him, but also the fact that, although dad was
extremely friendly and personable he didn’t take any nonsense. He told the man
that it really wasn’t helpful to mix up the paradigms behind astrology with
those behind physics which I think was not at all what he’d expected to hear
and I guess it kind of encapsulates dad’s wisdom and love of life but also his
unshakable commitment to doing and thinking what was right, that he had a very
clear, Occam’s razor viewpoint on the way the world was and the way it should
be and at every turn he did what he thought was best to bring this about and
that really is a unique quality in a human being.
It’s not
going to come as a surprise to all you who knew him that dad taught me an awful
lot of things. One of them came from what he wrote about time in his book ‘Living
in Connection’. He addressed the themes of chronological and Kairological time
and discussed the idea that time is not linear and, like love, it is a
boundless sea which our own perception reside in. I’d come across this idea
before but I’d never really understood it until I got it from dad and I think
it’s important to mention today because its shaped my outlook on life and I
think it shaped dad’s. He wrote about wisdom in some of his blog entries in recent
years and I remember him writing that he had been intelligent but he had never
been wise. This is of course typical of the wonderful self-effacing modesty. I
think dad was very wise and I think a little bit of this wisdom will help us to
remember him the way he might have wanted us to today – if time and love are
infinite seas then maybe death, like life is a part of that sea and maybe he
would want us to celebrate his life with the wisdom that comes from that
understanding, that he carried with him, that has influenced my life and that I will try to pass down to Alex and
Millie my children - that there is
something cyclical about the universe, about our existences and that is
something we should celebrate not something we should mourn.
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