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I had never seen Indira's face before. I had not even seen her in my dreams. I had been quite unaware of her existence and that a smile could be so warm as the one with which she would touch me. They say that a smile is just a smile. I believed that. I disagree now. When it unfolds from the riches of a beautiful soul, unpretentious, honest, and with the courage to respond with love, it has the power to change a person's life.
Meeting Indira did more than that. It opened up a new epoch, a kind of paradigm shift in thinking.
I too, had been moving towards such a paradigm shift. To some degree we all had. Consequently she affected us all. None of that was planned. A 'miracle' can't be planned. It couldn't have been planned. In fact, I almost rejected Fred's invitation to meet her.
I probably would have rejected Fred's offer that a go to India and meet her had Fred not been so insistent in his unique and loving kind of way. As my boss, he could have ordered me to hop onto the next plane and fly to New Delhi and meet her there for whatever reasons he may have had in mind. However, this wasn't Fred's way. I realized later that he had a much greater challenge in mind that arose from a greater expectation than what any boss could order a person to fulfill as a task.
When I got the faint sense of what he was up to, the very thought made it scary to comply. It wasn't a request, but was. His challenge involved a principle that was still new to me with, but which Ross and I had bragged about.
Ross had made a profound discovery in the works of a scientific pioneer that took us a hundred years back in time and opened up a portal to a future that seemed as distant as the moon, even though it was attainable right now as a matter of principle. Fred's challenge demanded the realization of what we discovered as attainable.
His challenge came like a shock to be sure. It is one thing to merely talk about a newly discovered principle and to explore its practical potential. It is quite another thing when one is demanded to stand up for it and put it into practice. Suddenly, the simple truth that is easily uttered involves a great challenge, like sticking one's neck above the trenches in times of war, or in my case, into the flow of life in a manner as no one has done before. Fred presented that kind of a challenge. It also seemed, that to say no was not an option.
Over the years Fred's visits to our outpost by the sea had become fewer. They had become far too rare in the last years that they could no longer be called a tradition. The tradition had ended. The reason should have been plain to us. There was nothing happening anymore in our neck of the woods. We were no longer the driving force pushing the leading edge of a movement to uplift civilization. To the contrary, our life had become dull. Our thinking process seemed to have ground to halt. We had become stuck in a rut. Even the advances of the past could no longer be maintained. They had all crumbled into dust over the years. Fred was well aware of that. A blind man would have noticed that we had gone back to the level we started from, and regressed.
Fred was concerned of course, but he seemed unable to figure out what precisely had caused us to get stuck. It appeared that he felt that Ross' discovery presented the answer. Fred may have seen his discovery also as an answer to the enormous challenges the whole world faced in the nuclear age, which we had one so vigorously faced. There had been times in times past when things had been moving with lightning speed for us.
It might also have been in part Fred's own inability to respond to our dilemma, which may have caused him to stay away from us for the past few years, and that now Ross' discovery gave him an inspiration, the kind of inspiration that sometimes comes with the Christmas season. He arrived unexpectedly, as he would have in the past, for a visit between Christmas and New Year. He simply showed up casually one blustery morning with a cheerful, "Merry Christmas," flowing from his lips, as if the intervening years could simply be erased. We were all at Ross' place, Tony, Sylvia, and I, when he arrived. Our getting together for Christmas had also been a tradition years ago, which Heather had encouraged us to revive. Fred arrived at their door that day carrying a bag of small presents, just as he had always done. He acted as if nothing had changed, and in the same manner Heather greeted him with a kiss.
"Wow!" said Fred with a smile. "Something has changed indeed."
I couldn't help wondering if Ross had something to do with Fred's visit. I knew that he had told him about his research and my involvement with it, but did he also tell him about the New World that emerged on the horizon with these discoveries? Or did Fred come to us on a hunch, or merely in another attempt to search for an answer to this puzzle that we had become. If so, Christmas did provide a perfect opportunity.
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