Serenity III: Firefly

Four years and four months ago, I was made very happy by Joss Whedon's Firefly. Up to this point, I think the only other TV series which made me this happy was The Lone Gunmen. I have enjoyed many other TV series, but these two have always given me the peace of mind that is marked by high good humour and a general (if sometimes slightly cynical) goodwill towards all people.

One of the many elements that makes Firefly so outstanding is the theme song, 'Serenity'. To this day, I think it is a song that speaks from my heart and to my heart about the world in which I have lived.

Serenity

take my love
take my land
take me where i cannot stand
i don't care
i'm still free
you can't take the sky from me

take me out
to the black
tell 'em i ain't coming back
burn the land
and boil the sea
you can't take the sky from me

have no place
i can be
since I found Serenity
but you can't take the sky from me

-joss whedon, 'Serenity' (theme from Firefly)

Serenity indeed.

Serenity II: Watching The White Wheat

Today I sit here and sip my coffee, noticing in passing that about 200 mg of caffeine later, I still feel rather calm and settled. They say that caffeination dulls your response to adrenaline, and in consequence helps you to live a longer and stress-free life. It's only people who over-produce adrenaline and already have hypertension who shouldn't touch caffeine — they just get diseased by it.

I look out on the prospects of the year ahead, and I feel contented and altogether too happy, as one of my friends recently remarked (or 'emarked', a new coining I have made to describe online remarks). I have the peace of the man who watched the white wheat grow. That tale is found in the Welsh song Bugeilio Gwenith Gwyn, which means 'Watching the White Wheat'; it is all about watching something that you sowed grow, while someone else reaps the harvest. If you can accept that (and it is a most Christian ideal to do so), then serenity can be yours.

There are so many kinds of serenity, and so little time we make for ourselves to enjoy them.

Serenity I: Agreeable Disagreement

I have been deriving much inspiration and comfort from a re-reading of Alistair Cooke's Letters from America. Mr Cooke was of course a man whom my parents held up as a role-model to me from a very early age, and his Letters were a nonpareil among the journalistic broadcasts of all time.

Recently, I have been moved to quote (and not the first time) a line from one of his Letters. This is from 7 Dec 1956, a long time before I was born.

"What I admire most in a man is his serenity of spirit... when he fights, he fights in the manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, not in that of a longshoreman cleaning out a waterfront saloon."

In all my life, I have tried to follow this principle of disagreement. I have always duelled like a gentleman, and not come after someone like a lout. It is this essential characteristic that distinguishes, in my mind, the spirit of a true leader — a scholar, an officer, and a gentleman — from the ersatz variety that we only too often find in charge of our venerable institutions.