Niko’s Eye

Chapter 74.

Aisha.

Aisha sat in her cell, pondering over what had happened.

What’s wrong with me? Is this how redemption begins?

Redemption is a way of being, a way of living, a devotion to loving - a trail of micro-destinations and affirmations to the road of the empathic warrior.

I treated Isis so badly. I should’ve given her what I never had in my childhood. Is there anything more morally bankrupt than asking kids to be resilient instead of working to create a world where they can be comfortable and happy as themselves?

Salvation lives in the way we love. It is in the kindness we give freely, and in being mindful for the wellbeing of one another and Mother Earth. It is in hurting when another hurts, in empathy over judgement. It is in sharing resources, in joy and in the kind of laughter born of pure spirit. Salvation may be a road discovered by only a few, but it is one made for all, one we may only walk together as one world.

Some folks who need emotional rescue are trapped in icebergs that took many years to form. When you bring your gentle flame to their outer walls and melt a little, if they are brave enough, they will light their own internal flame and allow the ice to melt. If they are afraid they will add more layers of ice faster than you can melt it.

We can work miracles when we learn how to move to the same beat, how to bring sweet vibes and sweet resources under one roof. Life can be one big party, or a million parties fighting each other, showing their uniqueness by creating the very differences that causes the ruckus. Emotional rescue for everyone happens when we get in sync. and move our feet to the funky beat.

When I’m feeling triggered the world and everyone it is behind fifty feet of glass. Loving bonds become inaccessible. In this mode I have to take great care not to damage bonds of love, the relationships and people who are everything to my heart and soul. For in time the glass disappears and my love returns. I wish I could stop the triggering, but if I feel unprotected or left to fend for myself it returns - it is survival mode, cold and indifferent. Yet even in these times I am cognisant of my morality. I still make good choices. I can still imagine what the better version of me would want me to do and then carry that out. I can’t undo the trauma I’ve been through, but I can adapt and overcome.

My apologetic mode comes with introspection as standard. I am winning the me versus me battle, you’ll see. Hopefully.

Isis.

Without awareness of the road or the rain, the car moved over the highway, lights on full beam. Aisha watched how the yellowed yet bright light played in the droplets, showing this deluge, this flood from the sky, in apparently solitary drops. Once upon a time she would not have been driving the car, no longer, she now breezed through the island with ease. This was her time to let her brain roam free and her heart explore new avenues, even as the mansion became ever closer.

I should probably do a little detour from here and just continue driving. I have so much to think about. Even though I say I’m okay, deep down inside, I’m deeply disturbed. Maybe I should be a motivational speaker. My life is already so much like a movie. There’s no ways it won’t motivate anybody else. And it helps that I’m a writer.

I always wanted to be an author, to write stories that brought people joy. I wanted to tell of the ways to love, how to be a source of greatness in even when your path is filled with sharp flints. I wanted to tell tales of the beauty that is everywhere if you dare to seek it, and that this universal love is enough to sustain you. I guess it’s a sort of survival guide to hostile environments, or to a toxic era where the love we need to build our brains and have health is either in short or unreliable supply. So that was my childhood ambition, to save the world one little story at a time and grow the pool of love until everyone could at least see the pain that has been killing us all, to stop blaming other seafarers for the storm and instead help me in the only quest that can save us all

I was a story weaver as soon as I began to speak, fantasy worlds spreading from my mind faster than the weeds grew in the springtime. I made new worlds as easily as others learnt their alphabet. They spun in my cerebral cortex, sinking to the back of my consciousness after their creation. Always there was the new world to form, the improved version. I dreamed of making stories to entertain, to delight, yet no longer. Now I dream of telling stories to heal and unite, to take what is broken and make it work anew. In a way I’m still following my childhood ambition, it’s just that I’ve modified it new "grown up" standards.

Childhood ambitions are the rocket fuel for the rest of our lives when they come from our own curiosity and drive. They are the seeds of a passion that creates a life well lived. They are a needed part of a healthy brain. With it comes a healthy self that can make healthy relationships within a community that will come to need the skills they develop, even if they cannot see how at the time. So when we learn to trust these childhood ambitions and see them as the seeds of greatness, we all win. There is only happiness and freedom for one when it exists for all. It is these childhood ambitions that are our guide to the path that is ours to explore. Every lifetime comes with an adventure that is our lifeline, and our compass is built of curiosity and love. It is when the unknown becomes alluring and work becomes play. It is how a challenge becomes welcome and the resolve to achieve it arrives as if it were a prompt and well scheduled train.

If we ever forget these ambitions, we lose ourselves.

Belvia.

Like everything else in the room the couch told a story, a testimony to the personality of its owner. It was a piece made more for style than comfort, a moderately priced copy of some truly talented designer. Underneath the blotches from casually dropped food it had been cream. She had aspired to a clean look, minimalist, pale, but lacked the self discipline not to each salsa and chips on it, glued to her B movies.

Belvia had most of her furniture moved to Barbados, from Mexico.

It is the type of coldness that reaches into my bones, as if my heart were a door left wide open to the icy wind, slamming only to open again. The only thing to do is keep moving, keep heading toward home and the steady warmth of the hearth. The sky is rolling blanket of cloud the colour of wet ash, and the ground its dank reflection. Each step becomes a prayer for home as we walk, seeing the light from the doorway in our flickering daydreams, letting it become more real than the stormy night. Isis is out driving in this rain and she hasn’t been back for almost 6 hours now. I haven’t had a chance to speak with her. It was worrisome for a female to be out on the island when it was pouring shitloads of rain.

The Caribbean island was different from the green paradise of home, yet in that difference there was more beauty than the soul can absorb in words. It enters through the eyes, travels to the soul and is of such great volume that the heart expands.

She thought of Aisha. She really was her own child.

Personality was once thought of as more inherited than it is. In truth the way we are has more to do with neuroplasticity and epigenetics than anything else. As such it is more fluid, as a river responding to its bed and the weather around. With love and nuture, with taking on our inner battles to become the best version of ourselves, by embracing our inner passions - this is proper characterization, for this is the character of humanity.

The linguistics of the radical wire up logic and self control to empathy to root society in core values and promote cooperation. The linguistics of all varieties of extremism wire up emotional indifference to fear (and sometimes logic without empathy). It is biologically impossible to make sound choices without using both logic and empathy in simultaneously, indeed, it becomes a form of slow-mo developmental brain damage that destroys both the connection of the individual to the best version of themselves and society itself. If a mechanic was miswiring a car you’d stop them, extremists (such as alt right) miswire the brain. It’s a kind of short circuit that cuts out the most important and most highly evolved human ability - that of love. God gave it. Let’s keep it.

All I had to do was love her. Shield her. Protect her. And now the person that she is, is exactly who I was. Isis has to know.