A Vision Realized

Across the Kallang River from my apartment block is the Kwong Wai Shiu Hospital. I can see the small complex from my bedroom window; three modern buildings with tall windows, rooftop gardens, a cubist facade. It's inviting like a hotel. What I like most are the thick vines that hang from each balcony. Bushy yet threadlike, a dense cascade that sways under the rain and wind. The hospital looks fuzzy to the touch--a far cry from the typical imposing medical institution. 

It is quite common for buildings in Singapore to have greenery overflowing down their outer walls. The built enviornment is a mimicry--the ubiquitous Rain Trees that tunnel the highways and umbrella the riparian paths, for example, are draped with jutting ferns, coats of moss and flowers, shooting spines and silky bunches, a layered canopy sheltered by a flat-topped crown that cannot but blossom amidst such abundance of water, sun, warmth. The city emerges from an equatorial dream. 

Lee Kuan Yew envisioned a garden city from the beginning, and the national approach since has been full-throated. From the CBD skyscrapers to the airport, the MRT stations, the art deco neighborhoods, concrete is meshed with life. 

Their style is a peaceful manicured softness, an abandoned yet welcoming allure. The caress and gentle of something slow, natural, geologic. It blunts the harshness of a city of millions. It soothes the contours of humanity. 

I took pictures of the buildings I liked most (plus a crazy tree). The integration of foliage is prevalent, and the layering is omnipresent. This is the 21st century rainforest. 

From the Universal Gate

On the side of the Tsz Shan Monastery, in the New Territories, there is a stone trough of water resting on grey river pebbles. Bobbing on its surface are wooden bowls and ladles. Their purpose is as tools to make an offering. The lady beside me misinterprets them for a drinking apparatus despite posted warning in Mandarin and English. A guard comes to chastise her--she looks quizzically before finishing her drink. I fill my bowl with a scoop of the cold water, and after a few deep breaths, I begin my walk down The Compassion Path. 

The temple is new but styled as old: dark wood like the shrines of Kyoto, illustrations from the Yulin Caves lining its walls, overgrowth creeping from the dense surrounding foliage. This newness is unsurprising. To get to Tsz Shan, we drove through deep tunnels connecting the scattered islands of Hong Kong, past countless towering apartment buildings and skyscrapers. Most everything was built in living memory. I was shocked to learn that the Mandarin Hotel, at twenty-seven stories, was the tallest building in the city when it was finished in 1963. Now it is shadowed on all sides. 

Waiting at the end of The Compassion Path is Guan Yin. Her towering statue, imposingly large notwithstanding its pure whiteness and slight groundward tilt, is more to the scale of the hills behind than the other figures in the temple complex. She looks beyond the walls with the warm gaze of the Enlightened to the common features of Hong Kong; steep green mountains rising from the sea, craggy shoreline, narrow protruding rectangles filling the space between. For she is the bodhisattva of compassion. Between her fingers she holds a pearl. In her hair is Amitabha Buddha. She empties a vase with her left hand into the Thousand Wishes Pond, to which I am walking to pour my libation into.

This part of the world has changed at an unprecedented pace and scale. Living people born where I currently stay started life in a kampong of attap roofs, a rural Malay village devoid of modern amenities, not so different than one from centuries before--now it houses a KFC and a mass-transit train station. Victoria Harbour glistenes in the night with neon reflection, and the only remaining Chinese junks take tourists on joyrides between the Supramax bulk carriers. Over 70 million people live in the Pearl River Delta these days, more than seven times the population there fifty years ago. 

Such rapid transformation is jarring, I can imagine. In the blink of an eye a new landscape has arrived. But it is inspiring, too. Just see how much can be done in a lifetime. Revel in the wonders of human ingenuity. It's part of why this region draws excitement. It holds a gravitas, an undeniable proof that the limits of belief are untenable. Here I feel my fears of change have been conquered, my nostalgia put to rest. The view she looks over still resemble that in Summer Mountains. The future can glitter on its own. 

The Path towards Guan Yin is wide, inevitable, and it is most beneficial to traverse with intention. Some water spills over the bowl's edge onto my shoes--whether my unsteady gait or focus is to blame I'm not certain. The tropical sun bears down with intensity. With every step the setting grows quieter, the figure more domineering. Her soft smile washes down with empathy. 

As I reach the end, offering what I carried in return for the wisdom of the divine, I ask for guidance in my desires, guidance to achieve fruition of what I most need. The salty ocean breeze combs my hair. Amidst the noise, the swirl of the world, there is a place to be found. With each passing day I sense I am closer.

Lion City

The air is placid in the Heartland--saturated, enveloping, heavy. I look up to the streetlamps bounded by low clouds, their light reflecting off an opaque ceiling. It creates a dim haze extending throughout the density. What I thought was a fallen brown leaf on the brick beside my feet had moved from when I first saw it. A narrow oval with a spinal vein, a tropical leatherleaf slug, slowly making its way across the damp Earth.

The Heartland is quiet at night, once the traffic has receeded and the markets have closed and the only people out are drinking Tiger Beer and whiskey around plastic tables doused in shadows. It's a far cry from the upscale wine bars and Michelin nominees, the plastered cityscape of allure, though their separation is a mere 15 minute train ride. But even there, in the center, it is quiet. Cars are few for their ungodly pricetag and the city's successful congestion pricing system. The only boisterous groups I've noticed are British tourists. The humans in this city-state, their landscape, all quiet. 

I find Singapore built at a human scale. The streets are narrow like their thin residents; the hawker stalls are manned by sole proprietors, all tools at arms-length. Last week I walked for 30 minutes and crossed three neighborhoods. Back home, I walk 30 minutes and haven't yet exited one. The American journey to the Heartland takes hours, days. The entire nation of Singapore is smaller than New York City. 

This human-centered development is tangible within the populous. I sense community is strong among the numerous elderly, who gather for tai chi and lor mee in the public spaces. Traffic lights change slowly--I suspect to account for the slow walkers who helped lift this place into the ranks of the First World. Singaporeans have the second-highest life expectancy in the world and are top 10 in the UN's Human Development Index, a measure of living standards and education. The youth are as phone-addicted and materialistic as anywhere (the global hegemony spares none, after all), but both young and old, I think, seem acutely aware that they're better off here than nearly anwhere else. Grumbling about the dominance of the People's Action Party (PAP) stays at that. 

The Singaporean Heartland is an interesting term. I wasn't sure I heard it right the first time, because how could a city have a Heartland, especially one known for its immigrant population and lack of natural resources. Apparently it was coined by politicians in the early 1990s to give a sense of esteem to the mostly ethnic-Chinese "middle class" who weren't part of the Global City project the PAP was undertaking to attract wealthy foreigners, multinational corporations, and a level of prestige that would lead to Formula One races and major defense summits and six shows of the Eras Tour. When I walk past the small cafes at the bottom of my building, the laundromat, the hardware store, it's evident I'm probably the only non-Singaporean living here. I get to see a life not meant for white-collar expats. 

These Heartland neighborhoods are constituted by public housing developments. The one I live in is from the early days of Singapore's industrialization, its units ringed by crown molding and an arched walkway of brown glazed tile separating the long kitchen from the living room. Public housing here isn't like that in the US--the Housing & Development Board (HBD) owns 1 million units that 80% of the population lives in (the state takes care of everyone). I put "middle class" in quotations because, here in this average complex, the parking lot is filled with BMWs and Mercedes Benz. Singapore's GDP per capita is over $88,000, after all.  

The people's reserved nature means outsiders are starkly so. I think I would do well as a native son. This city is filled with people like me who don't really have a natural place on this planet anymore: generational immigrants no longer interchangeable with those in the motherland, long-term economic migrants accustomed to their adopted nation, brown-skinned people more comfortable with English than their ancestor's tongue. Singapore has approached multiculturalism in a different way than the States, but both rest on their citizenry becoming one people. I sense a national identity parallel to "American" here. I think that's why the Heartland has drawn me in--it's a home, a firm, established one, not an effort to be something else.    

Leaving the Crystal Mountain

On the summery shores of a placid Lake Michigan, still and clear except a wandering sailboat close to the horizon, a friend brought up The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. I had been searching for accompaniment on the impending journey. I didn't know much of the book, only that it was nonfiction and slightly Zen. Later, walking home with the setting sun, gentle lacustrine wind kissing my shoulders, I looked deep into my reading list--there it was written, with a message next to it: (read when u get to Chi). 

When and why I left myself this note I cannot recall. My reaction was more suspicion than satisfaction, for validated foresight brings about a strange sensation. What is random coincidence, and what is inevitable? How dominant is my instinct, my blanketed subconscious? Something about this book called to me before my arrival. It spoke again in the early days. I have learned to listen. 

The Snow Leopard is a travelogue of an expedition to northwestern Nepal in 1973. The impetus was GS, a biologist, wanting to study the autumn mating practices of Himalayan blue sheep. Matthiessen joined for the journey rather than the destination. Aside from the sheep are the Buddhist monasteries he hoped to pilgrimage and, notably, a potential glimpse at the elusive snow leopard. At that time few outsiders had ever seen one; the solitary predators stalk the most high, most remote swaths of Asia, supremely camoflagued and adept and shy. They are a silent phantom on which wonder can be projected--an incarnation of the unknown, the omniscient, the unattainable. 

GS, Matthiessen, and their sherpa porters set out in late summer for the glacial slopes of Dolpo. The narrative is chronicled by daily entry--I began reading near the end of September, so the days aligned almost exactly with mine 50 years later. The air grew colder and the burdens grew heavier both here and there. Our rhythm synchronized as I, before concluding my day, would read of the splendors and tribulations my distant companions had lived, and reflect on mine from this small corner of the world. 

Before long I could hardly separate the story on the pages from the story in my mind. The overlap was uncanny--like I was opening a portal that transported me to my own thoughts and memories. The physical landscape, its jagged cliffs and sparse villages and endless sky, enmeshed with that I had passed in Ladakh years ago. Talk of the snow leopard, that specter cloaked in spotted mystery, was a manifestation of my personal fascination. The highs and lows, the tortuous yet hypnotizing voyage of novelty, suffering, growth, fear, snowy passes and shaded crevices, it all blurred in an enigmatic familiarity. The words eerily echoed the murmur of my spirit. 

Much of the book wrestles with peace and tranquility. This may be found--but can it be kept? Retaining harmony is a formidable task in the face of our constant turmoil. The onrush of sedentary problems, gaining in magntitude as Matthiessen departed from Shey Gompa at the foot of Crystal Mountain, prompts a regret for not holding the prior moment, for moving on to imminent distractions. This is a difficult reality to swallow. Was the journey not to gain something everlasting? The apparent futility of permanance, of solidifying a fleeting essence, burns alongside the unquenchable longing for answers.   

Aldous Huxley writes in Brave New World that "feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation." The world is trending towards instant gratification--eliminatation of the discomfort of waiting. After months of sleeping on frosty earth, after miles through the harshest, most inhospitable terrain, Matthiessen never does see the snow leopard. We can strive, but there is no guarantee of satisfaction.  

If understanding is transitory or, worse, illusory, what does the journey accomplish? What justifies the slow, opaque, moiling process? What is the snow leopard? 

I search for a central force to gravitate around. The push is the purpose for now, I think. As Matthiessen and company trudged onward, chasing goals overt and not so much, I too drive forward into unseen territory. Matthiessen wrote: "God offers man the choice between repose and truth: he cannot have both." I was drawn to this book of bodily and spiritual travail by some power, for some reason. There remain mountains to cross during the long journey home. I'm not sure how it ends. 

Signs from Above

The first page of The Unbearable Lightness of Being rubbed me the wrong way. Milan Kundera, Czechoslovakia-born Paris resident until a few weeks ago (RIP), is mulling the impact of an event were it to happen once compared with if it were to eternally recur. He says a one-off life is as non-notable as a 14th century war between African kingdoms, "a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment." The long European tradition of viewing everyone else's history (and lives) as inconsequential rides on. I fail to see how Kundera's precious Prague Spring had any notable impact on "the destiny of the world" either. Getting off on the wrong foot, I was hardly consoled by his continuation of the metaphor--that were the African war to happen over and over, it would take a different form; "a solid mass, permanently protuberrant, its inanity irreparable." 

I think this book is characterized by toeing the line. Set on the boundary of the Iron Curtain, its passages shift between objective observer and impassioned participant, mind and body, empathy and disgust. Actions are rationalized and embraced raw. As the title suggests, Kundera explores the fleeting nature of existence, the Lightness, plus its heavy flipside that ripples across relations and generations. 

Such a novel fits this phase of my life. It is present in every direction I turn--on the shelves of close people, in articles I read, even in the news. Whether this prevalence is frequency illusion or a sign from above I'm not certain, but I think it prudent to listen when called to. In this time of sorting, a human story unveiling our heterogeneity soothes.   

Through the pages runs a singularity; the lives lived, by dreamers and lovers, their mistakes and triumphs and even what's out of their control, it all happens blindingly fast and only once in an unending onward direction, a ceaseless march with all the time to look and reach back just far enough to graze with the fingertips, always perfectly out of reach. It's Unbearable. 

Part of accepting Being as irrevocable is to simplify, overcommit, generalize, and sacrifice. Though this is well-crafted literature written by an insightful man, I think it contains an acknowledged failure to capture the wholeness. In the narrative too, we go down a path with no hope of return, descending into the only universe here. Kundera taps in and relinquishes control. There is no attempt to answer what any of this is about. It goes on, amazingly. 

Beethoven's motif "Es muss sein!" translates to "It must be!" This take on fate embodies the philosophy of the first-person narrator, the author: there's one transient chance to make a decision, and there's no way to validate whether it was right or wrong, good or bad. Some of the characters commit to love, some to ideas, some to freedom. Who is to say which is better? In the subjectivity lies the beauty. 

My initial annoyance was assuaged at the end. A group of European and American intelligentsia travel to the Cambodian border to demand Vietnamese occupiers let humanitarian aid in. Amid a backdrop of commentary on kitsch and leftism, the bickering, righteous marchers reach the border and are met with silence. Their grand statement, built on the perceived importance of Western writers and doctors and actors and professors, is spat on by power, humiliated under lack of attention, destroyed. Sooner or later we're all humbled as mere Beings; weightless, burdened, passing our way through the Earth.

GSG

Every spring, in San Antonio, bunches of loquats appear on the branches of broad-leafed trees. The fruits pull each arm downward under their weight, as if beckoning a sun-tanned hand to reach up and twist them free. The tree grows tall, and many of the bunches have taunted me from towering heights where only the birds and beetles brave enough to climb can reach them. One time, my cousin scaled far up the tree in our neighbors' yard to retrieve a bounty. I'm not sure how he found footing in the dense thicket, for the loquat tree is not truncated but is instead bushy, shrub-like, layered--full of life. 

Personally, I prefer tangy to sweet. Over the course of the season the loquat turns from bright yellow, sour and firm, to a soft, sweet orange. By eating them during the first few weeks of spring I'd usually be the first one there. Sometimes small holes where a worm or insect had already started feasting pocketed the skin, but most were still up for grabs. 

In those weeks the tart, refreshing juice would run down my forearm after I bit through the skin. I would eat them straight off the tree, you know. None of this pre-washing or skinning. As I child I snacked on them while playing basketball, and I cleaned my sticky fingers by combing through the thick St. Augustine grass. 

I heard a story that the Portuguese first brought the loquat tree from China. Upon reaching the Forbidden City, the sailors offered a rose bush to their royal hosts, a thorny, ligneous gift that offended rather than flattered. In return, the Chinese gave their visitors a sapling they knew would yield a bitter offspring, acidic and nearly bile, plus a smattered mess underneath its canopy. 

But when the rose bush bloomed, the imperial court was in awe at the beauty and smell of the flowers. And the loquat tree, with newfound rigor from the Iberian sun, produced fruit that matured beyond the premature into a delectible, succulent sweetness (I tasted these plump specimens in late May in Spain--sweetness they truly were). I assume the Spaniards or Canary Islanders brought the tree to San Antonio during their settlement in the 18th century. The South Texas climate has the same effect on the fruit as was first seen in Portugal. 

In those spring days of the loquat, when San Antonio celebrates Fiesta, the end of the school year, and the sparing weeks before oppressive heat, Spurs playoff basketball would infect the town. The 2000s Spurs of my childhood were a legendary squad: consistent, lethal, always in the fray to win it all. And win they did. The two decades led by Tim Duncan's stoic excellence constituted an unprecedented streak atop the basketball world, with 22 straight playoff appearances and five championships to show. The players in the show seeped into the heart of the city: Tony Parker with his speed and soft touch, Manu Ginobili's obdurate boldness, the sage Coach Pop. 

I would imiate the dribbles and pirouettes I saw on TV in our backyard ad nauseam. The titanic clashes between giants and sharpshooters and slashers were the stories I recreated. I rehearsed myself finishing in a whirl around the rim, swishing jumpshots at the buzzer.  After tiring from sprinting corner to corner, I'd pick a few loquats and cool off under the shade of a floruit tree. Life revolved in this way. 

Since I left San Antonio for college, the Spurs haven't played much playoff basketball. I aged and so did our team. I haven't been there when the loquats emerge--I haven't eaten one off a tree in many years. I understand. Things change. 

But this spring, the Spurs struck gold by winning the top pick in the 2023 NBA draft. Who knows what prompted this blessing from the universe. Maybe it was in return for the years of service to the pure game. Awaiting is an otherwordly talent from France, Victor Wembanyama. 7-foot-5-inches tall, 8 feet from outstretched finger to outstretched finger, a shooter and shot blocker with Gen Z skills and that eternal unteachable skill, height. His impending arrival to the Spurs is widely viewed as a perfect fit; for the team, a chance to recapture the glory of sustained dominance; for the raw diamond of a prospect, a home to polish and refine into greatness. The pieces are fitting together. The people sense it. 

Sports has a way of infiltrating the lives of its dedicated followers. This has been on my mind in the days since the Spurs landed the #1 pick. I have hesitated to write about basketball before given the tabloid-esque quality of sports media these days, but I've also serendipitously come across some stellar sports writing recently: Roger Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace, the first half of The Patch by John McPhee. How the promise of a lanky 19-year-old over 3,000 miles away can send thousands of people into ecstatic fervor in an instant, how it can tap into the soul of a boy who adored his team, is nothing short of special. There's really nothing like it. 

With the resurgent aura of the Spurs rising, and the sun finally surfacing from under winter's cloak, I can taste the loquat on my tongue once more. 

The Last or First Day

"We can always come back," my friend said as we walked towards the car. In a sense he's right, I guess. I just couldn't bear to leave. The sun shined across a cloudless sky that day, not hot enough for any discomfort, cool and gentle wind keeping the skin clear. The chatter of birds drifted through the air. I was shown once again how idyllic the neighborhood can become. Its charm is brightest under the quiet Sunday aura of blossoming trees. The colors of the houses seem more radiant, the bricks and cobblestone of greater character. For a while I had traveled to another slice of space and time. The whiplash left me sore. 

I've heard the peculiarity of humans is our propensity to narrate. We frame existence as a continuous story, self-idealized protagonist at the fore, structure and rhythm layered onto the eras that pass. In these liminal moments the connecting thread surfaces--what once was returns once more. All the little things that add up over time, mounting into big things, are as if they never happened. The magnolias and cherry trees emerge from their winter slumber to a life never lived. 

Maturity seems to mean many things, but one aspect of it must be the ability to organize. The sentiments of one instant cannot rule every instant. Growing responsibility demands a level of competency, professionalism. Someone needs to hold things together.  

But at what point does compartmentalization go too far? When are the demarcating walls built too high? Maybe a dam is a more apt metaphor to consider, and a more appropriate barrier. Instead of deep, expansive, permanent divisions between the growing complexities, maybe a more responsive construct is useful. One with a valve to maintain the flow. 

We quietly drove east into the darkening horizon, together still after all these years. We rolled miles and miles and miles across the familiar pavement. The end of an old day ushers the birth of a new one, one that can be filled with the love of the past and the joy of the unknown. The partitions are more like fluid boundaries than anything else--I think I've learned how to cross over, for I know the linear path is all a matter of perspective. I can put the times gone in a box, and I can leave it unsealed for when I need them again. 

A Story of Migration (Uganda 1962- )

Manafwa Road, in Mbale, bustles under the equatorial sun. Boda bodas swerve around cratered potholes and empowered pedestrians, ferrying shoppers from errand to errand. A shiny TotalEnergies gas station is conveniently adjacent to the taxi park, where drivers loiter by their vans and hawkers push corn, sugarcane, plastic, to anyone around. Activity on the street is frenetic even in this relatively small town.

We came here to see the site of my father's birth. Fifty years of separation means the memories are mostly overridden, but the building my grandfather constructed remains standing. The street was much quieter back then. Same with the Kampala corner my grandmother grew up on--Uganda's population has exploded since they left. Amidst the change, however, there remain signs of what once was. Many of the shops lining Manafwa Road are still South Asian-owned. 

My mother struck up conversation in Urdu in one of these businesses, to check if maybe someone had stayed through Idi Amin's regime, if maybe someone remembered when this was our home too. She found the ears of a more recent arrival, Ahmed, who came from Pakistan a few years earlier. With great hospitality he offered food, drink, shelter, anything of service to fellow speakers of his native tongue. Very Ugandan of him--the culture is communal, exuding a jovial tolerance evident in how the people drive and gather and laugh. 

Ahmed told us he initially hoped to live in the US. In 2017, he flew from Punjab to Brazil, where he had landed a visa. This man subsequently traversed the length of the Americas towards the allure of a better future. Our exhaustion from tracking mountain gorillas for a few hours in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest just days earlier was now shameful: Ahmed had crossed the Darien Gap, the jungles of Central America, the Andes. He reached the US-Mexico border at Tijuana months later. After jumping the wall, he was swiftly detained. He shivered and despaired in detention for an entire year before deportation back to Pakistan. 

A home is left, I thought, and becomes home for another. Movement, that defining trait of humanity, is our foundation. Where we are, how we got here, where we will go. What is the destination of our never-ending journey?  

I sensed perseverance in the bones of Uganda. Humans have walked there longer than almost anywhere else. Strength, and perspective, comes with such old, deep roots. There is a general calmness flowing from the shared certainty that life goes on. I stood at the grave of my great grandfather, in the soil my ancestors once came to, and was connected. 

I have no doubts that people will dot those fertile, rolling hills until the end of time. 

Life Snippet

The setting sun sent pink rays shooting eastward. The backdrop to the towers morphed from cotton candy to sorbet clouds, magenta and streaking blues, a lightshow on the ceiling of the world for all to enjoy equally, far below. The sky over the river was darker but brilliant, too. It was the latter stages of a grand finale: the Sun's reign. 

Collective witness has a way of bringing people together. The experience is shaped by the presence of those also there, reveling in the undeniable realization that something bigger, something special, is at hand. An unexpected break in the way of things--an inbetween, liminal moment, I guess. Someone turned the music up, and the waves pumped in on a detectable frequency. My phone buzzed with footage from across town. A street corner bathed in cherry blossoms. The stuff of creation, dreams. 

The hierarchy is of no consequence here. Anyone can stop to see, to feel. The lucid colors wash time into a new phase. For an instant we were finally one. If we know anything, we know another instant will come. 

Historical consciousness

I've been grappling with how to approach Absalom, Absalom! for weeks now. It seems every time I look away it's still there, connected to the entirety, somehow escaping the eternal struggle to simultaneously define itself separate from and within the group. Faulkner personified shared emotions into individual beings--ideas into human essence. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in the introduction, which is the best one I've ever read (I read it after finishing the novel as I tend to) and a most challenging undertaking to be assigned, that Faulkner aimed "to dramatize historical consciousness itself, not just human lives but the forest of time in which the notion of human life must find its only meaning."

What is so unnerving about the whole thing, for me, is how clearly the way the group and the individual influence each other is shown. People embody the spirit of a larger force, crafting it and carrying it on. We act as we should in the medium of past and future, killing and dying for the responsibilities shouldered. For the way things are done. We find the path that led us here, and we sow the seeds of where the path goes on. 

Our intelligence mandates an explanation. Heritage orients existence. I visited the Temple of Dendur on a fall day, its sandstone blocks transported across seas to lie in this cavernous hall. Augustus commissioned it in Upper Egypt over 2,000 years ago in the style of the then-ancient pharaohs. It was an ode to a great lineage, a landmark in time signaling the proper order was in place. 

Historical consciousness can hold us hostage to the lofty goals set by our predecessors. As much as this may be reflected in grievances, power grabs, hierarchy, it can also be reflected in peace and gratitude, too. The Samai people of Malaysia carry a nonviolent dogma with them from their distant past. They have an expectation of benevolence and agreeableness, respect and free will. They are likewise oriented by tradition in time. Why theirs developed in this manner, as compared to the imperial ambitions so common in our species, leaves me wondering. Once we define ourselves on the basis of our group, is that who we are forever?