come to think of it that one actually grew up in a matriarchal setup in which grandma was quite vocal and influential on family affairs. also, there were democratic aspects in which grandpa would ask you what your thoughts were regarding particular issues though there were authoritative elements as well, but these were really meant for good intents within the context of upright upbringing under moral supervision.
one of the interesting and perhaps strange things was how both grandma and grandpa fused Afro cultural/traditional components with religious aspects of the church as we were raised within the Lutheran church. so both of them were neither "cultural purists" nor religious fundamentalists.
out of these kind of fusions, one learnt that life is composed of a chaotic setup within which exists all sorts of things. therefore one must develop the skill to extract useful aspects from each chaos in order to construct one's final analysis and therefore a method of living, instead of a stereotypical singular path.
yesterday I read some philosophy related article in which the author argues and highlights that certain historical or antiquity philosophers such as Islamic philosophers, Christian philosophers, Jewish philosophers etc mingled amongst each other and really extracted ideas from each other without being dismissive of each other. He further highlights that we need to move away from the racist notion of statements such as "western philosophy" as if that philosophy wasn't influenced by North African philosophy via the interaction of the Greeks with Africans for example. he suggests that we rather speak of "global philosophy" whereby we only zoom into local contexts to see what was happening at a particular place in space and time in order to learn of that local thought. the idea here is to demonstrate the chaotic benefits of a world order in which the "whole" is composed of aspects from localised contexts as reflected in how my grandma and grandpa fused things together.
the people looking for an initial orderly setup of things in life are actually the ones causing problems because they are looking for a perfect world which does not exist, the orderly configuration aspects of the universe such as the solar system itself emanates from a chaotic expansion of the universe as the stars continue to collapse and form in the galaxy!
Mahlomaholo also writes that it is out of contradictory processes of death, rot and decay that life is formed such as in the case of a worm for example.
therefore, chaos appears to be a precursor to an orderly world.
so, I am thankful for their insights and understanding of the chaotic structure of this life and how they continue to impact my thinking. . . . .
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