Free Life Beyond Measure by Sidney Poitier Page A

lived up to this moment—5:17 a.m. on this seventh morning of November 2007—that should reveal more about the whys and hows of where my adventures took me.
    Vivid in my mind is the memory of the day sixty-five years ago in Nassau when I was fifteen years old and came to a turn in the road when it was time to leave home for good. If that seems young to you, I would have to agree that I was ill prepared to face the challenges that awaited me in America—yet again an environment radically different from the one to which I’d become accustomed inNassau. One of my few advantages in weathering the storms ahead was that even by age fifteen I had a core of knowledge that was going to travel with me—a sense of who I was, regardless of what the world chose to say to me.
    That sense of myself has been described by others as someone who is a loner, an outsider, a private person, and one driven to walk on the edges of life. Those descriptions are fairly apt. Whether I was pulled or pushed to those edges has varied, and depended at times on survival needs. Walking the edge doesn’t mean that I’ve been reckless, at least for the most part. In fact, I have looked at options through reasonably cautious eyes. As a loner, I have needed to pay attention, to ask for explanations and read between the lines for hidden purpose, and, first and foremost, to rule out danger or assess the levels of such dangers that might be present. Misjudgments sometimes exact unpleasant penalties that will sit in memory as warning signals to protect against future misjudgments.
    Caution has been well earned, especially because there was a time when I was a most impulsive risk taker—which I eventually outgrew, or have almost outgrown. But it is due to the nature of who I was long ago on Cat Island—even then a loner, an outsider, a private person—that I am still inclined to walk on the edge—of course, not nearly as much as I once did. Well, as you know, I’m eighty years old and have learned to adapt my risks appropriately. In those rare moments still when I flirt with the dangers of the abyss, it is the memory of my mother’s whap-whap form of discipline, sternly administered in my earliest days when I was behaving foolishly, and the echo of her voice that intervene. “Sidney,” she would say, “that thick skull of yours, what’s up there? Not one thimbleful of common sense that I can see!” And then wouldcome the two or three whap-whaps. That always pulled me back from the edge—and still does.
    Being a loner can be lonely, my dearest Ayele, but there are rewards, too, to having a rich internal sense of self—a mechanism for making order out of life experiences and for owning the internal terrain, even when it is a terribly private place. For many years it was just me there inside it, alone; having feelings I couldn’t put into words, and not having anyone with whom I might dare to share them even if I had the words—except for Teddy sometimes. In hindsight, I might have opened up more to my mother, which might have made the mother-child separation less painful when the time came.
    Instead, I chose not to be alone as a loner by being at home in nature—in the daily outdoorings of my childhood and youth, where the world buzzed and sang with life that reverberated in my inner world. Walking on the beach or sitting on rocks, my eyes on the horizon, aroused curiosity, stirring joy, all the while allowing me to make connections to the externals: the sounds and sights of birds, some of them large ones flying from other islands over Cat Island; the lapping of the waves; the clouds coming over and obscuring the sun; lizards scrambling about; and the hum of crickets.
    In my earliest days of childhood, I learned to converse with the environment that spoke to my own inner landscape, that tapped my curiosity and goaded my imagination into cooking up the most spectacular daydreams. The more accustomed I became to listening to what was being said, the