Sometimes life presents us with moments that lead us to question the logic of how we are perceiving the world. Sometimes, in order to attempt articulation, we make might bring these moments into fictional presentations - toyings with what we might think of as alternatives to how we originally sensed that moment.
There was one moment in my life after which I had to stand - I was standing and figured I might as well continue - and try to fathom the reality that had just been presented to me. Nothing too earth-shaking, but there it was - a moment of being presented a new perspective on a world I had thought was one way, but was suddenly recognizing as another.
Nothing escapes us, whether we acknowledge it or not, true or not, and really, we can translate and triangulate as much as we want, believe that theories are actualities, truths are fictions or fictions truths, maybe wander off on our own walkabouts of conjectures, maybe feel that there is an amazing beauty to it all. So here's a story.
A guy goes to a conference that has a theme of some sort of betterment of mankind. The guy has an interesting idea - or at least interesting in his own humble opinion, belief, I mean, that's the reason he went to the conference, with belief and hope of gaining more knowledge, perspective and depth of understanding that might fill in around some of his interesting idea and provide some sense of order and sense of purpose within that whole landscape of mankind betterment. He was there to listen. He was there to learn. He was there to ask questions.
There was one particular question he asked a man who was associated with a large non-profit organization that funded a lot of global campaigns for the betterment of mankind. The question was: "Would I be able to get funding from your organization for a project that explored how little funding it might actually take to solve a potentially global problem at a very local level?"
There was a bit more to it, maybe, but that's about the essence of it, the simplified rendition; pretty much, essentially, it was a question about whether a large non-profit organization whose specific focus was on the betterment of mankind could or would fund a project whose main focus was to see how little it would take to use local insights, an understanding of on-the-ground realities and a quite large network of good people interested in working on good locally relevant activities to figure out how cheaply they could all work together to do something as inexpensively as possible in a way that would allow the problem-solving activity to become self-sustaining and even viably self-replicating across many countries around the world.
The answer that the man who was associated with a large non-profit organization that funded a lot of global campaigns for the betterment of mankind was, "no". He said that they wouldn't be able to fund that sort of project. Straight-out, unhesitatingly he simply said no. Because, he said, they mostly worked on projects that worked within machinery that was created for large-scale projects, that had huge funding structures, large metrics for success and the bigger the project the better because they could show big numbers and big numbers are what, this man said, needed to be produced. It was big numbers that caught the eyes of those who would be working with the next funding round, and the next, and the... Their non-profit wasn't cheap to keep on perpetuating itself, this man said. It's a very competitive world, this man said.
So the guy with what he believed to be an interesting idea stood there and thought alongside this man who was associated with a large non-profit organization that funded a lot of global campaigns for the betterment of mankind. Anyone standing close-by and happening to look at the two men at that moment might have caught the two of them seeming to nod to each other with an acknowledgement of something left there to float between them, to hover.
Then, if anyone were there looking, a funny thing might have been seen. That thing between those two guys suddenly took on a life of its own and became a bird that flew away off into some distance of escape, around the mass of so many people who, it might be supposed, had so many interesting ideas for some sort of betterment of mankind. The bird finally found an open doorway and, whoosh, it was gone.
The end
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