Life's Constancy

With the constant debate going on about it over recent years, I feel compelled to mention that technology isn’t inherently destructive; just like any other tool, it depends on who is using it. As an aspiring writer, I have been using technology, such as Facebook and Twitter, as a platform to help showcase ideas that inspire my work. A means to promote myself as an author to allow the audience some insight into my thought processes; what motivates me in everyday life, and as a means to connect with others different from myself.

But that has not always been an easy feat for me to accomplish, or for a good number of other people as well, as I have discovered over the years of reaching out to others. After a while it just became difficult to trust or connect with most people anymore; and it became apparent that after so many negative encounters, the fault lay with the prevalence of implicit biases. Prejudices that many people usually rely on every once in a while, even for the best of people roaming among regular folks like us. A learned behavior developed over a lifetime of erecting defensive barriers to avoid having to feel anymore pain that may come with any interaction.

Writing, although, has helped me through most of it. Something I have always done since I felt compelled to write down a dream I once had back in high school. But I didn’t realize how helpful and necessary writing was for me, as a means to express myself and to heal the pain, until the delayed sense of grief over my grandfather’s passing finally caught up to me. Never did I know my biological father; and that bugged me for a bit, whenever people talked about standard familial units. It was only after my grandfather’s passing that I figured I had known my father all along, and his name was Rudolph Adolphus Alleyne. The man whose namesake I was given.

Coming up on the one year anniversary of his funeral, it’s a bittersweet sense of irony that it took his passing to bring this to the forefront of my mind, but a lesson learned later is still a better lesson to have never learned at all. As my grandfather was prone to say on occasion, the only constant in life is change.