Skin in the game

It’s hard to know what exactly to say about the recent forcible removal of statues of slave traders and colonisers in public places in Britain and Europe.

On the one hand, it’s a great step forward towards racial justice and equity: putting up a statue of a person celebrates their contribution to the culture of the society in which they lived and worked. 

Seeing the bringing down, dragging and (in some cases) the beheading of statues of Colston and Columbus and co., I feel like I’m watching the French Revolution in real time, even though I agree the repellent values they embody should not be respected. 

But my Facebook and Instagram are filling up with videos of real people being actually killed, caught in the person-to-person crossfires that are cropping up everywhere. And beheadings and lynching are terrible things to hear of, because whether it’s audio or video these are our fellow human beings doing terrible things to each other, and having terrible things done to them. 

The dominant culture propagated by the West for the past 400 years is being visibly challenged. The Colonisation and its underlying belief system is being questioned, and those who profited from it and furthered it in their time are being removed from their pedestals.

I see the red paint-spattered faces and shoulders of these men, and watch them being pulled down by ropes and trundled down the streets and thrown into the harbours where their slave ships docked, their petrified bodies kicked each step of their un-royal progress by people of all colours and creeds. 

With these images in my mind, I think of the tumbril, that crude, terrible open cart in which the aristocrats were taken to the guillotine at the Place de la Concorde, through a howling crowd, who were rejoicing in their abrupt reversal of fortune. 

J.K. Rowling

We are seeing living icons falling too: J.K. Rowling, whose unprecedented personal popularity rose with the rise of social media, and was partly created by her engagement with it, has now fallen from her plinth, and even though she has been responsible for her own fall, it’s not hard to see the parallels between her being verbally dragged and vilified on Twitter on the vast platform her own talent had created, and the stone men in their stone costumes being thrown into the sea. She, like them, was famous in her time for her philanthropy. It was the ‘tax’ she paid to occupy her exalted state. 

To be frank, even a cursory check will show us the marginalisation and tokenism in the characterisation of the world of ‘Harry Potter’ where we saw one Chinese girl, two Indian girls (because they are twins), one West Indian man, one Irish boy, one Jewish boy, etc. Hogwarts was their home, and Hogwarts reinforced a lot of dominant narratives of race, as well as gender. 

Cho Chang and Padma and Parvati Patil are all described as the prettiest girls in school, but they all behave like bimbos, in comparison with the intelligent Hermione and the brilliant Ginny, both stout examples of the ‘best of (Anglo) British.’ We would be accurate in seeing these portraits as identifying JKR’s socio-cultural narrowness of mind. It was there all the time. In plain sight.

Perhaps this represents Rowling’s personal ‘pushback’ response to the loss of Empire, and the rise of immigration in Britain. She herself did not have an international education: her school and university education was local, regional and provincial, and she was not hugely well-travelled when she wrote the books, 20 years ago. 

Her current challenges on Twitter, in my opinion, are caused by her fame (and expectations of her wokeness created by it) outstripping her personal ideological evolution. She is being cast off because she will not recognise the validity of variations of gender identification diversity. 

But she is really not a pluralist: over and over, in both gender and race, she portrays a rigid binary - two races: white and non-white. As if white is normative, and everything else is other (and undifferentiated). Which (I assume), is how she prefers it to be. If she didn’t, she could have created a more diverse world - in a magical realm of her own invention.

Those ideas of binary rigidity are not words to live by, or uphold in the modern world. They have no capacity to inspire or include the rainbow spectrum of human existence and experience. 

In the late 18th Century in France, it was people power that was in the political ascendant, and being called an aristo traitor got you a death sentence. Today, in 2020, with its voracious and volatile identity politics, the current unpardonable public crime is racism. 

People who exhibit this noxious quality are doxxed (search for and publish private or identifying information about a particular individual on the Internet, typically with malicious intent) and exposed, and rough and ready justice is dealt to them by a Twitter mob: a motley crew of genuine anti-racists, educated socialists and historians, anti-imperialists, Marxists, intersectional feminists, liberalist humanists, anti-fascists and anarchists, and people who just like causing chaos, some of whom have been paid to foment civil disorder by interested parties, and brought into the relevant town in buses. 

Milan Kundera

We must take great care to select what we are replacing the torn down myths with, now, and consciously choose better. The writer Milan Kundera, brilliant witness of the dismantling of democracy and the rise of socialist autocracy in Europe during the Cold War, noted: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, and its history. Then have somebody write a new culture, invent a new history.  Before long, the Nation will begin to forget what it is, and what it was.”

Many things that have had a stranglehold on our imaginations are being challenged in the here and now: not history or culture alone, but mythology. Our selective memories and cultural narratives are being mass audited. History is being created, and we are here to see it, not just as witnesses or recipients or inheritors, but participants and co-creators. 

‘A Little Is Enough’ - published in The Sunday Island, 10th May, 2020.

It’s two months since curfew came down on us, cutting us off from the all you can eat buffet tables and the succulent Wagyu marbled beef platters and all the flavoursome foods of the life we had got used to. Was it actually real? It seems like a dream, now. A haze of drizzle and fondant and glaze. 

At speed, but experienced slowly, like time lapse photography, the casual grocery impulse buys of early February have become the craved high end luxuries of late March. 

I had believed what I was told: that the middle class was growing, and that urban elite Colombo had plenty of money to spend, and money and time to burn on grills and rotisseries and pies and patisseries. But how quickly austerity came in, riding shotgun with the fear of Death and rumors of this terrible, non-discriminating disease. No amount of wealth could immunize anyone from it. 

Even a store-cupboard full of authentic Italian pasta sauce in lovely glass bottles, and a fridge full of Scottish smoked salmon and mild white English cheddar cheese would only delay the inevitable, as imports were cancelled. 

People started growing their own garden vegetables in pots, and baking their own bread. Indigenous medicinal plants and herbs were praised, and Facebook posts became focused on conserving what we had, and extracting the most value out of every ingredient. 

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess 

Did we really need to have so much, and so often? As our bodies waxed fat, did our souls shrink thin? Are we all better off, actually, for an indefinite period of intermittent fasting? I am not talking here of those who never have enough to eat. 

I was surprised to see the queues at the superstores, and the empty shelves. I don’t think our generation has experienced the fear of actual hunger before. Even the most disciplined person has been conscious of their privilege. By acknowledging it, and the inequity that underlies it, they pay the social tax that enables them to go on attending the round of banquets and feasts that constituted life in the Capital. Rich people have further to fall. Their elevation makes them vulnerable. 

But I think if you have so much that you lose count, and the sense of each individual item becomes indistinct, over time you don’t feel the true worth and the luxury of having things. Bit by bit, Eke Eke Eke. It is pleasing that a phrase for metaphorically making something last as long as you can, ‘one by one by one’, is visually similar in English. 

The Branston Pickle Miser

There’s a fine line between prudence and miserliness, stocking up and hoarding. I have heard a wealthy man complain at his own table that his wife’s guests were eating too much of his favourite Branston Pickle, and spreading too much clover honey on their morning toast. This was because he lived far away from his beloved England, and Fortnums did not deliver hampers full of Gentlemen’s Relish to his home, and rare commodities rise sharply in value. You could see him measuring the amounts with his eye, and finding the smallest teaspoons to put beside the jars of the precious delicacies. 

He had been dirt poor as a boy, he said: a scholarship kid at a cathedral school. And he grudged people’s wish to make him share because he knew how hard it was to create a personal hoard, and build a sanctuary, crisis-proof. He opens the store cupboard sometimes and just looks at the bottles, and touches their coin-shaped lids. 

A person sharing her experiences on Zoom recently said that, for the first time since she set up her own house, she is doing her own marketing, receiving her staples direct from the trucks that deliver fresh vegetables on the road; and she weighs each item in her hands, and knows the selling price of each, down to the smallest measure. She has never felt so grounded.

Self Made = Sovereignty 

I too have been breaking new ground, in the new earth. My shellac manicure started to split and flake off weeks ago, as I dig in the garden to plant seeds for vegetables, in pots and in the small garden beds. My friends’ hair is growing grey they say - and I think they look lovelier this way. We speak to each other in our pyjamas in a way we have never done before. 

I never knew until now that you can grow whole pineapples in pots, by planting their spiky tops; or spinach by planting their white stalks in the earth. The store cupboard becomes less important when there are living things striving for life and expression in the garden, with their bright energy and stubbornness and momentum for joy. The slow natural progress sets a schedule of its own, and we adjust to it. The sun pours on us all: seeds and stalks and stems and human beings, each morning, and then the clouds come in and the rain falls every afternoon. There is harmony slowly building from the slowly earthing roots of our abruptly interrupted former life. 

We have left it very late, I know, but - even now - it feels like Time itself is on our side, and we have a wealth of it. 

Sharing Is Caring

Almost at the end of the fourth week of curfew, there are some observations that can be made. The global pandemic has prompted varied responses in varied governments across the world. One of these is clearly manifested across the whole spectrum: the damaging belief in personal (cultural, ethnic or socio-economic) exceptionalism. 

Faced with a human catastrophe affecting all human beings with a respiratory and immune system, none of whom have herd immunity, many people’s default response was to believe and hope - against all the odds and accumulating evidence of statistics and data - that they, personally, their race and society and nation, had some kind of innate inbuilt or circumstantial protection. 

If you want to remind me that this is an unprecedented event, for which no country was prepared, I do take your point. My concern is that there seems to be a sense of wishful thinking operating where people assume that they themselves would be immune as a race or a nation or a culture, just because their country’s numbers of infected persons were initially low, and so they did not enact early intervention or vigilant precautions. 

Mass testing for a person to person transmitted contagious disease is far more indicative of the state of the spread than restricted testing. Yet despite the evidence that this worked well, many countries did not practise this. Given the opportunity to observe the tragic rise of numbers in South East Asia and Europe, and the reasons for them, many still did not adequately prepare. Knowledge sharing between countries was essential. But different governments had different views of what they should share, and what they could implement, in their own countries. 

    Human beings like stability, and no one on earth wanted to believe that the crisis would be extended, and that restrictions of mobility and access to provisions would become normalized. Clearly, many people were not prepared physically or emotionally for total shutdown, and did not have time or financial resources to stock their cupboards with necessary groceries, medicines etc. so governing authorities are balancing these considerations against each other, based on the numbers each country faces on an ongoing basis. 

The problem  is, the numbers on which these decisions to impose or lift restrictions are decided may be low because of lack of testing rather than actual lack of infection. So this gradual extension of restrictions based on the developing situation is hard to implement effectively. 

It’s been like watching a terrible, apocalyptic game of musical chairs. The countries that have managed it best so far have been the ones who imposed severe restrictions rapidly, before the number of deaths in their communities started escalating. Democratic governments have been slower to lock their citizens down, and have appealed to their sense of civic responsibility. This commendable respect for citizens’ individual rights has unfortunately led to countries with a great deal of economic resources  leaving it very late to intervene, and so failing to limit the spread of the illness throughout their communities. 

     It’s harshly ironic that the very aspects of human life which make our lives enjoyable and meaningful - community events, people socializing, eating together, worshipping and celebrating, doing activities as groups - have been the very activities which spread this contagion most virulently. 

We have all been required to make sudden major changes in our thinking and conduct: to face the reality of residing and working exclusively in our homes, without the relief or outlet of outings or adventures of any physical kind. Any faults or threats in our relationships with those we live with have been inevitably highlighted, by the enforced stay at home orders. 

      We have seen queuing, frustration and fear of actual hunger as stores logistically struggled to move from a small online payment and distribution process to total online purchasing in a few days. Competitive eyeing by people of each other’s ‘quarantine cooking’ has been noted, with self-styled ‘concerned citizens’ pointing out the insensitivity of people posting up their own culinary achievements in the face of the hunger of their fellow citizens. 

Until limits on how much people could buy at a time were brought in, there was vocal dissatisfaction expressed on social media towards  ‘the people that went and hoarded at the beginning [and] are nicely relaxing at home sharing pics of their food on Facebook, while the considerate few that actually thought of others and didn't hoard away are starving now.’ 

The initially often repeated phrase ‘we are all in this together’ was quickly shown to operate differentially, according to the amount of square footage each person lived in, and their level of preparedness. Blaming and criticism was natural, but it was not indulged in for long. 

On the national level, preparedness was also the differentiating factor. Faced with the urgent resourcing of medical staff with respiratory equipment and protective gear, the distribution and allocation of essential goods in wealthy countries was shown to be not as effectively managed as in countries which are less resourced, and therefore less arrogant. Community funding of supply chains and community awareness of the need for social distancing and better hygiene became crucial. 

Sri Lanka’s excellent response as a citizenry showed little delusional delay and time-wasting self pity. The recent experiences of war, natural disaster and terrorism have created a practical and resilient people with the essential capacity to thrive in conditions of austerity: the ability to be frugal, the skills to conserve their personal resources, and to repurpose their possessions. 

From the very start of this crisis, community organizers started raising funds and collecting commodities to protect the most vulnerable. The ability to think as ‘we’ and not just ‘me’ is the true test of a people in an event like this. It is a concept of survival on a collective level. Psychologists and counsellors have shared their expertise freely, to assist the public to manage our natural feelings of anxiety and panic, and to progress from individualistic survival thinking to a more generous approach which will ensure our success. 

The miracle of the loaves and fishes comes to mind, at this juncture. The true miracle of that event, where want was turned into plenty, may be that everyone shared what they had, and the result was that everyone had enough. What we are witnessing is that it is not how much a person or a country has, but how effectively they manage and distribute their resources. 

False Positive

Our Cultural Traditions and Norms Could Kill Us

I am really worried that in SL our ‘island mentality’ and relaxed and convivial social norms means that a vast amount of the population do not understand how important it is to change their cultural habits of closeness and community gatherings (both family and religious) immediately. These traditions might kill them. And us.

The rest of the world is really of not much significance to people with an exclusively local mindset. Nationalism and patriotism which are good in themselves taken too far mean that most people feel that the rest of the world and its happenings do not and will not affect us. Interconnectedness and exponential numbers and pandemics and actions which must be taken to ‘flatten the curve’ are hard to conceptualise without the language to put it into words.

We are proud of our high level of literacy, but that is literacy in Sinhala, and this virus is international, universal and global. And most of the effective warnings and sound medical advice coming in from the countries who have first dealt with it are conveyed in English. These must be translated now, immediately, and the messages conveyed through visual images so everyone can understand them. Island wide, in every form of media.

To survive this pandemic with minimal losses, our beloved lifestyle of sun and sea and social vibrancy and inter-connectivity has to change. Principles of the laws of causality (cause and effect, how every action has a consequence) need to be understood. Social distancing, proven to be the most effective limit to the spread of this virus, is alien to our culture. People are tactile, and show support and affection through physical proximity. It is not going to be easy to change this mindset.

Everyone has to say: ‘I am sorry, but we have to not see each other in person, for a while.’ Children who were at school in their hundreds until a few days ago, with dozens of kids in large tuition classes, and adults in social gatherings and business summits and meetings, are likely to possibly have been in contact with people who unknowingly have carried this. I have been reading up on it daily, seeing what happens in other countries compared to SL. The culture here is very social, enmeshed and inter- generational, and it is impossible to stop people being in contact with each other just by advising them to do so. They do not as a whole understand the numbers, or the urgency.

We must think back two weeks from the first declared cases: Where were we? What were we doing? Who did we see? And they say that the incubation period may be longer than 2 weeks. More like 3.

We cannot take any risks now.

I saw on Twitter 2 days ago, the comment that: ‘Pettah is full of people. In supermarkets entire families are shopping accompanied by little ones and grandparents too. The TV showed some religious gatherings with many elderly people participating. Very few are practising social distancing by keeping a metre apart’.

I am happy to report that when I went grocery shopping yesterday at the local Food City, the shelves were well-stocked and all essentials were in good supply. No one was pushing or shoving, as we have seen people doing in other countries. The staff wore gloves and masks. But the security guards outside were not wearing the masks properly, some covering only their mouths but not their noses.

This kind of haphazardness of preventative implementation is completely eclipsed, however, by the criminal moral ignorance and unforgivable unconcern displayed by those who have attended large communal gatherings in the past two weeks, with information about the spread of this illness and its high level of contagion widely available to them.

Whether gathering for religious reasons at festivals to pray for their families and country, or to celebrate brotherhood and camaraderie and sentimental traditions at 3-day sporting matches, it is clear that the numbers of those infected explode after events like these. In the name of personal pleasure, and of spiritual sanctity, our fellow citizens and their compulsions are about to inflict unwanted damage on us.

Even this for me paled in comparison to the news that there were citizens returning from Italy last week, blatantly lying to immigration authorities about their place of departure, to avoid quarantine detainment, careless of the consequences to their families, friends and the doctors who they expect to look after them when they fall ill, and think they are having heart failure because they cannot breathe. Their highly developed sense of personal survival far outstrips their sense of collective responsibility.

The entire medical staff of a large hospital are now in quarantine instead of being able to assist, at this critical juncture. It is obvious that the medical staff need community support: not only in the form of understanding of citizens  of their own crucial personal role in limiting the spread of the virus, but also in terms of our collective awareness that this crisis will take some time to pass, and in the meantime doctors, nurses, and all other medical staff need equipment: especially respiratory equipment, and supplies of personal protective gear. Not only in the short term, but in the mid to long term. They are most at risk of getting ill, because they will be most exposed to those who are ill, and for prolonged periods of time. A community funded and supported supply chain would be a wonderful creation, with social service enterprise groups, online activist groups and philanthropic individuals all contributing.

On a social level, the medical staff in every hospital will be working round the clock, and they will need food and drink and sleep in order to be healthy enough to care for those who will fall ill. It is a slow-breaking and terrible tsunami they are facing, as the numbers of those who are infected rise and start to explode.

Community groups who are assisting the elderly, immuno-compromised and less able amongst us by shopping for groceries and essential medicines for them must be supported. It is time to be vigilant on behalf of those most vulnerable, and to serve and protect them. All the things we proudly celebrate in our culture: the importance of family, the love and concern for our children, our compassion for our fellow human beings, our pride in our nation, our concern for the suffering of those in trouble, have to be translated into direct action, now. Or the words will be empty and the hospitals (and cemeteries) will be full.

It is unfortunate and ironic that many of those celebrating so joyfully at sporting events are highly likely to be ardent patriots, sincerely devoted to their families, schools, and formative institutions, and all round good people, thronging temples and churches and kovils and mosques, and sporting stadiums and arenas, in numbers at every gathering of the faithful.

Not knowing is not as bad as not caring. But both levels of unawareness of the vital - and viral - connection between self and society may prove disastrous.

Our collective ignorance about these issues has - until now - been merely frustrating. From this week, it could be fatal.

Touch Me Not

There’s a fascinating flowering plant known as ‘the touch me not’, whose leaves curl up for a few moments in self defence when you touch them. It is also known as ‘The Sensitive Plant’. The Romantic poet Shelley wrote a poem about it, likening its behaviour to that of the soul of the poet.

Two hundred years before Shelley, Shakespeare’s King Lear had also practised some marked social distancing: in his case, rejecting the kind comradeship of his dear and loyal friend, The Earl Of Gloucester. Gloucester, accused of treason for aiding and abetting Lear who had been banished from his own kingdom by his two elder daughters, was blind because he had had his eyes put out while refusing to confess under torture. He had been cast out of the castle and told ‘to smell his way to Dover’. Being blind, he had stumbled through the chaotic countryside at the mercy of every whim and weather.

Finally, hearing his old royal friend’s voice, he is overjoyed, and asks for proof of his identity, as he cannot see his face. He wants to show his continuing love, loyalty and respect by kissing his hand. King Lear’s response is right in tune with our times:

Gloucester says: ‘O let me kiss that hand’.

King Lear replies: ‘Let me wipe it, first. It smells of Mortality.’

Some context here: the body and the person of the King or Queen is traditionally regarded as sacred. A common person cannot touch a royal person - all the rules of feudal hierarchy decreed it. You could look, but could not touch.

Courtly love rules also required that a true and devoted lover would see his lady as unattainable: she was so high above him, he could never hope to do anything but love her spiritually. He projected his ideals and aspirations onto an image of her, and she guided him through this world like an embodied angel. Ethereal, illuminating and untouchable.

On social media this past week, people are suggesting that instead of hugs, handshakes or even fist bumps on greeting each other, people should bow, as they did in the Eighteenth Century, or put their hands together in the succinct and subtle Namaste.

Our hands are suddenly of great concern - we are being told to wash them several times a day, with conduct books on the correct way to wash our hands being circulated via Instagram and YouTube, in still and animated images. It is because of our hands with their elegant musculature and opposable thumbs that we developed into human beings, able to  make things, from Stone Age tools to planetariums and rocket ships.

With our hands, we touch everything in our world. It is how we instinctively connect with the things and people around us. So now, it’s gloves on, rather than off, but hands on (committed) rather than hands off (disinterested) in our attempt to combat the deadly virus disease, and the low standards of personal hygiene of our fellow citizens.

The corona virus COVID-19 has now been declared a pandemic, which means the focus is now on getting prepared and resourced to deal with it. Do we have enough equipment in the ICU units to protect the health care practitioners who will be treating hundreds of us? Do we have enough soap, hand sanitizer, face masks and cleaning products in our homes?

Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the responsibility of the judgment of Jesus of Nazareth as a criminal. Lady Macbeth, hundreds of years afterwards, thought ‘a little water will cure’ the deed of murdering the reigning King of Scotland. Then in a dramatically symmetrical karmic infliction, she develops compulsive obsessive disorder, washing her hands repeatedly, with no one but her husband understanding why she thinks they are unclean. Isn’t it ironic.

Her doctor says: ‘What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands’.

The lady who looks after her says: ‘It is an accustomed action with her... I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.’

The lady herself, in despair, trying to ‘sweeten’ her hands with every scented soap available, asks: ‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean?’

There it is again, the smell of mortality.

Unfortunately for us, we sensitive plants, we are not abstract creatures, and it is through touch that we convey love and receive signs of affirmation, affection and acceptance. So now that personal contact is being said to be dangerous, we are comprehensively deprived of a source of happiness and our sense of tactile belonging is diminished.

We are being told not to travel, to work from home and conduct conferences, seminars and classes virtually by Skype and Zoom. Technology may enable us to communicate, verbally and visually, but on the personal level I think that the lessening of physical presence and proximity we will now inevitably experience as we self-isolate will create an outpouring of dreams, and romantic fantasies.

We will create avatars and iconic images of them in our imaginations. Those we love will be the very ones we do not want to touch, for fear of contaminating them with our viral mortality.

The Elixir Of Youth

A girl sits on a chair in a blaze of media coverage and accuses adults of stealing her dreams and hopes for the future, and lacking the courage to fix the problems she and her generation will inherit. Did the world alter its velocity, or change the way it spins on its axis? Was anyone listening? Was she over-emotional? 

Astrologers do an identikit portrait of her personality from an interpretation of her character qualities, based on the positions of the planets at the hour of her birth. Instagram and Facebook are filled with images of her, demanding ‘How dare you?’ And almost from the first moment she speaks, her words and her expressions are transformed into a myriad memes and GIFs. 

J.K. Rowling wrote about prophecies, and envisioned that children would rise from their enforced passivity in a crisis, and would save the world, in Book 7 of the Harry Potter series. This idea is opened up in the classical quotation at the beginning: 

‘Oh, the torment bred in the race,

The grinding scream of death

And the stroke that hits the vein,

The hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, 

The curse no man can bear.

But there is a cure in the house,

And not outside it, no, 

Not from others but from them,

Their bloody strife. We sing to you, 

Dark gods beneath the earth. 

Now hear, you blissful powers underground - 

Answer the call, send help. 

Bless the children, give them triumph now.‘ (Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers)

Whitney Houston sang it in ‘The Greatest Love Of All’: ‘I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier.’

The children of today have grown up fast, and in many ways unprotected, in the shadow not of nuclear war as Generation X did, but amidst the collapsing structures of economic systems which have polarized the world and destroyed the habitat and the moral environment simultaneously. 

But life finds a way: intelligent organisms survive because they adapt, and seek to not merely survive, but thrive and flourish. The wisest know that if a long term survival is wanted, this flourishing must be inclusive and not competitive in the ‘kill or be killed’, ‘win or lose’ ultimatum way that is modelled for us by many of the current leaders of the world. 

It is the passing of the baton that is happening. Inter-generational respect given and demanded. And it is sustained in the actions of the Hogwarts students, hope of the future generations of the wizarding world. They organize, they rally, they defy the rising elements of fascism and sadism. They retreat underground, threatened and defiant, and go into formation; but they emerge with the ability as well as the will to create a better world. The difference I see is that there is a big picture vision available to them: something that is more than ‘Me Me Me’. 

It seems as if the youth movement of 1968 is going through a recycling sequence: 50 years on, and fuelled by frustration and cynicism instead of idealism. Youth are rallying, but their collective uprising is being modified because they are also being rallied and herded. They have withheld themselves from corporate enslavement and the proffered icons of glorified wanderlust, boycotted the convenience of toxic consumables, rejected mechanistic education processes and embraced alternatives to binary thinking. But they are children, being scolded and told that they are disrespectful of their elders. 

The sharp sparks of the Arab Spring, selectively televised protests against the Global Financial Summits, the transport disruptions in Hong Kong, the fresh-faced disaffected in their trillions are becoming fierce, in the way the sensitive do when hit too often. 

'You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,' 16 year old climate activist Greta Thunberg thundered this week at world leaders at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York. 

She has accused these leaders of ignoring the science behind the climate crisis, saying: 'We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth - how dare you!'

I have been thinking - with Greta’s voice echoing in my ears - of apocalyptic fairy tales and futuristic fiction: in William Goulding’s ‘Lord Of The Flies’, the entire structure of civilization devolves into a struggle for tribal supremacy amongst a group of children. The ending is a brilliant wake-up call: we have been so immersed in the politics and sociology of the brutal battle for survival that we have forgotten the protagonists are children. At the end, after people have been killed and democracy lies in ruins, an adult comes to rescue them and sees a bunch of children who look like savages. 

In Orson Scott Card’s brilliant dystopic ‘Ender’s Game’, the global ‘threat’ takes the form of a space war, and the enemy is an alien race. The ‘soldiers’ who are trained to fight are children, aged 8, 9 and 10, recruited and trained in tactics and skill, and damaged immeasurably by their loss of childhood and their longing for its innocence and its possibility of spontaneity and joy. Ender the child protagonist is manipulated by the adults who are training him: they let him believe that the real war with its mass destruction of a species orchestrated by his special skillset is only a realistic training session. The truth devastates him. 

Greta Thunberg is suspected by some of being used like a ventriloquist’s dummy to voice socialist political viewpoints, and this narrowing of her impact is disrespectful of the bigger picture she has so far managed to articulate. Child labor is used illegally throughout the world, and children are trafficked and utilized by predators and exploiters of all kinds. The rights of children have only comparatively recently been recognized. And more abuse is being reported all the time, and investigated and prosecuted by Royal Commissions. 

What concerns me today is that the thunder and the anger being expressed and generated so fiercely will shortly become whimpers and muffled cries. That the fire of outrage will be doused. That the damage has been done, and the human race is run. 

‘Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be,’ sang Whitney Houston. But she herself, and her only daughter, died tragically before their time. And J.K. Rowling’s wondrous imagination failed to provide her heroic, triumphant children with a life less ordinary in their mid 30s. 

My favourite part of the last Harry Potter film was Professor Minerva

McGonagall making the statues coming to life, to help defend the embattled school. Somebody has made the equivalent of that spell happen, in the world today, and (all rhetoric and bluster aside) this may be the way the world we used to know, ends. 

Out with the old. And the thread of continuity between the generations frayed so thin. 

Designing Our Joy

I attended a talk given by a former Olympic athlete recently, a man called John Coyle, who won silver at Lillehammer in speed skating, and is now a motivational speaker of eloquence and energy. 

The subject of this talk was the difference between chronological and experiential time: or, as he put it to us, how to create the endless summers of our childhood days, as life seems to get faster and more bound by routine and less joyful as we grow older. 

A lot of our best memories as human beings, the most vivid, the most loaded with sensory impressions, are lit up in our imagination because they were our first experiences of something: our first swim in the ocean, the first climb of a sacred mountain, our first dance, etc. Anticipation was huge, and our openness to the experience was heightened by adrenaline. 

The teenage years and our twenties and early thirties contain some powerful life experiences, electrified by wonder, because they extend the boundaries of our known world. We are growing, through study, work and socially, and we are on an arc of expansive discovery. 

Physically, our bodies are full of vitality and we are fit and flexible: energy in motion. Our immunity is high - we can shake off illness and depression easily. We are enjoying the adventure, and the process of rapid growth and learning. 

John Coyle pointed out that in our search for stability and freedom from anxiety in our lives, both professionally and personally, we often settle down after this early flurry of activity into a passive and unexciting personal Middle Ages. Goals are achieved, and the mode is ‘keeping on keeping on’ - continuity, life insurance, health insurance - rather than discovering new ground. It becomes mechanical, and often tastes stale. 

We are becoming petrified - not in an exciting way. We are turning into stone. How do we know this is happening? When we cannot remember doing anything new or meeting anyone different for ages. When we find ourselves doing roughly the same things and saying the same things with the same people. Year after year. Like clockwork. 

This is chronological time. Measured by sameness and routine and schedule. Monochrome in colour. 

The vibrant colours of wondrous, life-enhancing experiences are how we measure experiential time. And according to Coyle, we can design at least 5 or 6 of these experiences in our lives each year. 

The more we can do so, the more alive we will feel. 

We plan a trip to a place we have not been to, before. We read books or watch films we have never known or heard of. We challenge ourselves to expand our habitual food and drink repertoire. We make new friends. We alter our set patterns, and make life more interesting and less predictable. 

Perhaps most importantly, we embrace the concept that danger, trauma and emergency should not be airbrushed out of our lives. We should allow ourselves the opportunity to go outside the sanitized realm of our perpetual safety and comfort. We could challenge ourselves to face and live some inconvenient truths, amidst the high volume thread count sheets and luxury towels of our survivalist aspirations. 

Coyle told us about a trip he had made with his daughter to a resort a few years ago where everything was luxurious and gorgeous - and in which he felt restless and cocooned. He suggested they go for a walk towards a town they could see the lights of, nearby. He had not researched it or prepared for the trip. The town looked closer and more accessible than it was. 

They took ages to get there - and as it was on a tropical atoll, their rubber shoes were ripped to shreds by the coral on the sands and they were in physical pain, dehydrated, hungry and exhausted when they finally sat down. But he said the meal they finally had at the end of that unexpected trip was one of the best and most delicious feasts he had ever enjoyed. He can remember every part of it in detail, years later. He can recall it at will. Because it was such an unexpected contrast with what had come before. 

Listening to him, I remembered something a student of mine had said some years ago. His sister suffered from depression, and he had observed that she would send herself into a downward spiral by focusing obsessively on one negative event or situation and blowing it all out of proportion to the point where she was frantic with sadness, glum and downcast. She felt helpless to stop this process once it started. 

He said, I thought what if she could reverse this? She could find one thing, however small, like a tiny orange flower in a grey arid zone, and expand it, zoom its significance in her mind, intensely celebrate it, until it took over all her mental space. It would be a remedy for the sadness! 

Similarly, we can create joy for ourselves and certain select others by planning opportunities to surprise ourselves, to be open and to respond in a heightened way to what gives us most pleasure. We can slow down the time for these joys - we can zoom in on them, mentally. These are the experiences we remember, and we can pattern them like lights on a string, to illuminate our way.