Posts

Showing posts from December 13, 2020

IT WAS WRITTEN IN THE STARS - AN ACCOUNT OF LIVES IMPACTED BY 'EVERYDAY ADVERSITIES.' PART 73.

Image
  What we recall of our experiences of the past, tends to be a factor of how they impacted on our senses at the time, the strength of our continuing attachment to those experiences.   And the extent to which we have succeeded in assimilating them into our subsequent experiences and move on with our lives.' Kazaliwa was now a nearly free man, but he was still officially tied to the criminal justice system.  He still had to continue to play his cards right, as it were, to fend of the risk of being recalled to serve out the rest of his sentence.  This awareness of what could happen would remain with him and his parents for years to come, and would, to some extent, impact their relationship. All of them were still tied to the system; Kazaliwa directly and Nzuri and Mfanyazaki in directly.  As Kazaliwa went about making contact with his Probation Officer, Nzuri busied herself making her son his first home cooked meal on the outside.  Kazaliwa had become proficient at not only boiling wa

JUST PHILOSOPHISING - ON WHICH 'FREEDOMS' ARE OF GREATER IMPORTANCE. PART 13.

Image
  Having babies, children, raises the question of ownership, or, probably more pertinently, possession.  The question can be asked: 'Who, if anybody, owns and/or possesses a woman's pregnancy?  Is it the woman in whose body the baby is growing and developing?  The woman who has primary responsibility for the care and nurturing of this developing human?  Is the pregnancy owned by the woman and the biological father?  Or is it owned, collectively, by the family and the society in which they live?  In a slave society, it is clear that the slave-owner and his/her family owns both the pregnant woman and the developing foetus inside of her. Repugnant though it seems to us, that was what it was. However, the 'rights' of civil society, as opposed to a slave society, in which humans have been made into a consumer product which can be bought and sold, are rather different and nuanced.  With ownership and/or possession comes responsibility for both the woman carrying the developin

AN ENIGMATIC AND POIGNANT JOURNEY AROUND MY AGEING AND EVOLVING MOTHER! PART 103.

Image
  She still tends to draw her conclusion about things before objectively looking at the evidence, and then interprets her perception of what happened, in a way that supports her conclusion.  And once she has made her conclusion, she seems either or both unwilling and unable to accept the factual evidence and use it to correct her misperceptions. But for all her now more obvious mental and physical decline, I still marvel at the very obvious strength the character of my dear mother.  At how she wakes up early in the morning, normally between 0615 and 0700.   At how, clearly with some difficulty in ensuring she remains vertical, she makes her way to her bathroom to attend to her normal personal hygiene routine.  Before making her way back to her bedroom to await her carer making her first visit of the day to prepare her breakfast and carry out the morning's carer's tasks. Her stance and her movements can, increasingly, show signs of hesitation and evoke responses of apprehension