An Unusual Journeying (Part 1)

I was born with a payload of odd genetic traits. I'm sure many of you have them too, but perhaps not all at once. I have an odd form of colour-blindness, some missing enzymes, odd bands around my arms, functional ambidexterity, a brain which is resolutely neither left-biased nor right-biased, and some other stuff. I used to think, when I was a child, that I wasn't entirely human.

Now I am older, I marvel at the range of humanity and people we call human (and who look human each day) and realise how human I really am. But one of my genetic traits had an unforeseen and deeply empowering result in my life, and I will discuss this later.

An aside first: the Latin word peregrinor is an interesting verb meaning 'to be different, to be unusual, to be strange or foreign, to wander, to voyage, to journey in foreign lands'. Try to understand that its sense is somewhat akin to the Greek xenos, as in 'xenophobia'. It is the word from which we get the name of the peregrine falcon - i.e. a falcon which appears to be always wandering or travelling.

When I was about five years old, I contracted a nasty illness because of one of my genetic traits. I began to haemorrhage everywhere. My quick-thinking grandfather ensured I was rushed to hospital, whereupon I was hooked up and treated to a complete blood transfusion. I felt no fear. I had been having these nosebleeds ever since my return to Singapore from the land of my birth. I bled easily, scarred easily, had learnt to endure the daily inconvenience and the finger-pointing of my peers.

It crossed my five-year-old mind that I might die. I resolved then, at that very young age, that dying was OK. It was quite peaceful in the hospital, with the regular and muffled sounds, the enforced visiting hours and meals, the solitude and quiet. And the next stage, as far as I knew, was death. So be it.

My mother and grandmother thought I was being excessively morbid. When I recovered, they always got upset when I spoke of it. The menfolk were more mysterious. They had a secret. I'm not sure know if it was the one I now know they have.

You know, when you have decided that dying is OK, life holds no terrors for you. You don't become more reckless; who wants to die in some crazy and violent incident which leaves you in a semi-dead state or an extended condition of pain and suffering? But you become more composed. And very little that people can do to you will change that. Inducements, threats and blandishments are irrelevant, since you or the other person might well be gone before they can take effect.

And you don't go crying to God in fear of death and the afterlife; if you go to God, it is in conversation during the still silences of the night, during the sliced moments of the day, never with human fright, but with rational fear.

The attitude that people perceive you have will also be unusual. Many people will not know why you are like that, why you will speak in the darkness, or do the peculiar, or endure the insane, or attempt the impossible. Not that I do all these things, but that's just my opinion. In my next post, I'll be more specific about the outcomes of journeying in this state of mind.