It isn’t often we perform – as we did today – our routine bicycle ride throughout the neighbourhood at 8:00 o’clock in the morning. We were amply rewarded for our pertinacity. The temperature was ideal. There was a slight breeze. The sun shone brilliantly. And the sky was a picturesque mixture of azure and billowing white. Those few whom we encountered en route were distinguished by their quiet resolve. The ceremony was clearly one of primary importance to the start of the day – echoed naturally most often by the obvious ambition of the dogs on their morning constitutional.

For whatever reason as I later languished on the garden patio in the warm sunshine, two images overtook my blind perspective into the empyrean atmosphere. First, the business of being on top of the world – as though one were regarding the twirling impressions below from the summit. Second, the notion that I am embodied by strains of association from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec, Massachusetts, Michigan and California. Lately I have with equal rarity reflected upon what I imagine to be the significance of young parents greeting their first child; specifically, the prospect of growth and development.

When I consider the possible obstruction to advancement in this life it is in the result no small compliment that any one of us succeeds to accomplish something of benefit to ourselves and others. Nor – thanks to the influence of the late Raymond Algernon Jamieson QC – do I for a minute relate life’s cultivated meaning and functionality to those of professional description only; rather, I am anxious as well to insist upon recognition of the skill and utility of the trades.

Within my immediate family – that is, among those with whom I have at least passing acquaintance – the description of employment includes fur trader, wholesale fish monger, diplomat, private nurse, lawyer, doctor, art dealer, technologist, civil service mandarin, standup comedian and writer, television personality, photographer, plumber, homemaker, cook and industrial foreman. There have as well been insinuations both political (Premier Gerald “Gabby” Regan) and celebrity (Howard Hughes).

The first thing I learned about politics as a child in rural Nova Scotia was that you got paid for your vote. Before I knew the name of the prime minister I knew that on election day a local ward heeler would drive into the yard with a two-dollar bill (in later years it was a five-dollar bill) for my grandmother and a bottle of rum for my father. Sometimes two ward heelers came, a Grit and a Tory, one after the other, and sat in our kitchen smoking cigars. Then my father, already half-drunk from his first pint, would manoeuvre with transparent slyness for a second. No, no, Sam, I ain’t been to vote yet; kinda thought mebbe I wouldn’t bother with it this time.

In that microscopic world the cigar was like Jomo Kenyatta’s fly whisk or the Gentleman Usher’s Black Rod: the emblem of power. Society was divided unevenly between the Little Man and the Big Man. The Little Man had better learn to keep his mouth shut and his arse low, my father said. He was a guy who had worked with his hands ever since he was 14 and whispered the words to himself when he read the Halifax ChronicleHerald. The Big Man, whether politician, lawyer, doctor, storekeeper or sawmill owner, could afford to keep his arse high — and smoke his cigar.

In the end all the varied expressions of achievement are a marvel. And somehow being on top of the world facilitates the view of what transpires about oneself on the earth below. The heightened, abstract vantage curiously identifies the ultimate scope of the otherwise picayune detail. The journey from beginning to end is complicated in the interim by fastidiousness and precision.

Though it may resound a non sequitur I was further stimulated today by the existential admission that “we is what we is“; that is, no amount of reverie, fabrication or supposition will alter a particle of our nature on this globe. For some this may amount to a shackle of existence; for me, it signals the fortuity of life, an occasion for limitless expanse and discovery.