I am currently trying to put my time of isolation to good use and I am working on a non-fiction monograph that I hope to see published during the early months of 2021, God willing. This book is a sequel to a book I published in February 2019 and it is not neutral material I am dealing with. I complicated the matter further by the fact that I wrote a third of the manuscript and I left it untouched for about 15 months. There were many reasons why I had to put it aside, but now I feel like reprimanding myself for doing so, because it is not easy to get back into the “fight”. The upside of this mistake I had to make is that it afforded me a measure of emotional distance – which is what we normally lack when we are inside the “arena”. I am writing a bitter-sweet account of misunderstandings which occurred at a certain institution between the local and foreign staff members, which led to humorous and threatening moments.
When we are immersed in a situation we don’t understand, we usually act and react as our dominant personality traits dictate. Yesterday, as I was working on a particular difficult part of my experiences within the community I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I came upon a sentence which reminded me of my dominant usual response to difficult situations; a mental pause that resembles a “cease fire situation” in my brain usually arrests me as I try to figure out what is going on. Unfortunately, this pause does not guarantee I will be calm and composed. I think I must quote the sentence, “I became conscious of an unseen physical force which had wrapped itself around my mind because I could not make any sense of what they were doing.”
Just to bring balance to the situation and delete the idea that I was innocent, perhaps I contributed to this misunderstanding I was experiencing? The Bible urges us in Romans 12: 18: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone (NIV).” Striving to maintain that level of peace on foreign soil and within an international cohort of staff members is not an easy task as we all know. Sometimes being at peace with ourselves is a battle on its own.
When I read the line about the “force” that I felt around my mind, I remembered a painting I made in 2018, which I called, “Mesmerizing misunderstandings”. This an acrylic on canvas diptych.
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