The balance of nature

The Met office having last night warned us to expect windswept, torrential rain, we went down the coast to a quiet beach this morning. As I expected, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and not a single wind-turbine was whirring round pointlessly. Our dogs ran about like lunatics on an almost empty strand of beautifully variegated pebbles and sand, and after walking almost to the headland, we found a sheltered place to sit. The old soft cliffs are gradually giving ground to the sea on our stretch of coastline, and these giant blocks of grey shale make perfect seats. In fact after being worn a little by the Channel, they resemble Epstein sculptures. You could perhaps call them Ephemeral Art.

I have no idea what it is about a slightly choppy sea heading for, and then splashing onto, a beach, but for me it is an almost instant producer of Alpha waves in the bonce. Listening to the sound and watching the process itself is very calming. One wave after another of foamy invaders hitting the stony sand, now advancing, now retreating: the tides always make me think of life in general – especially economic life – and how everything is in transition. It seems to be a lesson contemporary business people and politicians can’t learn…if indeed they understand it at all.

Those who bemoan inner city life, blaming everything on cuts, institutional racism, poverty, glass ceilings, class warfare and ‘capitalist scum’ should get up early on the weekend and drive to the sort of place where we spent the morning here in the Old People’s Sane Republic of Dorvon. All classes, ages and genders wander about, everyone says good morning with a smile, everyone spreads their arms and says isn’t it lovely. I can hear the cynical snorts and sneers from here, but the truth is that most dysfunctional behaviour has a root cause in the immediate social environment: family, housing, noise, aggression, concrete, drabness, job fulfilment….and their consequent effects on self-esteem. Add this to the political brew of entitlement (and media glorification of self-pity) and the result is depressed people digging their children into a deeper and deeper hole of drug-addled hopelessness.

“Every day,” the Buddhists suggest, “do something slowly”. This is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever read. As the EU madhouse demonstrates at least once a week, most deadlines are false, most anxieties groundless, most snap decisions bad, and most ‘goals’ pointless. To bring up kids to be good and contributory members of society, to enjoy the span you’ve got, to think beyond the superficial in problem-solving, and to compare what people say is urgent to what we think important: these are goals to which everyone should strive more often. But the nature of our culture not only hinders that: at times it positively forbids it.

There has never been a ‘world’ in planetary history that moves as quickly as this one does. And there has never been a more robotic acceptance that all acceleration is progress. “We must go faster to produce more so we can all be better off and thus able to afford cars that get us to the office faster in order to produce more and we must have food that comes faster so we can increase productivity and earn bonuses that allow us to afford bigger houses needing more money and smart pocket communicators so we can keep up with all the news that just gets faster because if we are to keep up in todays world we must go faster.”

In that vicious, circular saw of a life, most people forget very quickly how to achieve a degree of tranquility. They drink more than is advisable just to remain mentally stable, and use some of that bonus to whack more Colombian pure up the conk. Or they eat food – fast food – for comfort, and become obese. And they become so busy being huge, coked or tranquilised, they fail to notice that – while they were at the office or stacking shelves seven days a week – lots of lazy idiots took all their liberties off them without receiving so much as a whimper of complaint.

We have never – and this is per capita, not meaningless totals – consumed as much drink, drugs, anti-depressants and tranquilizers as we do now. Politicians and business leaders scratch their heads: ‘How can this be?” they ask themselves, as they have yet another Cabernet-Sauvignon fuelled punch-up in the Members’ Bar.

People alter their consciousness because they get bored, anxious and depressed using only the one they’ve got naturally. Politicians, neocon economists, bankers and lawyers are mainly to blame for our unintoxicated lives being so awful. And the doctors who warn us not to intoxicate any more cannot – as ever – see further than the end of a stethoscope. Rather than saying ‘change all of your life’, they constantly look for ways that people can make these lives longer with the use of fat dissolvents, ‘healthy’ diet plans and censorious orders about only having a small sherry at Christmas. In doing this, they take no stand against the culture; rather, they increase everyone’s longevity and make the overpopulation of our island more acute still….and the cost of aged care stratospheric.

That’s unfair to doctors in some ways: we all have a responsibility to offer an opposing view to the rushing madness that drives everything to the cliff-edge but insists that there is no alternative. But doctors should do more, because they are in a position of persuasive influence. So too are teachers, media role-models, programme makers and a hundred other forms of plancton simply going willingly with the flow towards Victoria Falls.

Watching waves all day makes Jack a very poor boy. But working every day to no particularly functional end makes Jack a very dull boy. And saying ‘poor me’ from the comfort of an urban gang makes Delbert a very dangerous boy indeed. The times they are indeed a change-in’. Let’s all try and stop the nutters lurching from one extreme of misery to another.