©
One foggy plastic Tim Horton’s iced-cappuccino cup. One dark blue Crispy Crunch wrapper. One Player’s cigarette pack (25 regular navy cut). An icy-blue Dentyne gum box. That was just the quick count along the roadside. I backed the lawnmower up and accidentally ran over the candy bar wrapper. It exploded into a blue puff of plastic confetti.
Normally I stop to pick up the roadside litter before mowing on the Town’s side of the hedge. This time I kicked the trash aside to pick up later. I remember when most people simply chucked car-garbage out the car window, including lit cigarettes. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I’d like to believe that those days are over.
I have to admit that I’m conflicted about my lawn. I mean, here I am wasting gas on mowing, while I grumble about picking up a few bits of waste paper and plastic. I’m sure that my consumption of gas is a bigger environmental crime than someone littering.
There’s an obvious tension between my due-diligence maintaining a neat yard and someone else’s sloppiness messing it up. Both acts end up being wasteful.
Wasted energy is becoming a hot topic lately, especially in science circles. I picked up a copy of Scientific American’s Earth 3.0 this week, and one of the articles deals with exactly that. It features a very cool diagram showing all the sources of energy—coal, oil, wind, solar, etc.—and where that energy goes—transportation, manufacturing, home heating, etc. But the most amazing thing about it is not where the energy goes, but where it doesn’t. It turns out that 53% of the energy we generate is totally wasted.
In other words, here we are worrying about the end of fossil fuel, the effects of extreme climate change and creating new sources of energy—and we’re chucking away more than half of all the energy we collect. Now there’s human behaviour at its clearest.
Kids are a good example. This morning I got up just after one of the kids did. I started shutting off the lights after them: bathroom (2 bulbs), hallway (3 bulbs), kitchen (10 mini-halogen bulbs), dining room (8 bulbs) and home office (1 bulb). All these lights for just one kid—and it was bright daylight outside.
This same child once berated me for turning on a single light during the one hour of darkness on Earth Day. Sure, we all know that we won’t save the world one light bulb at a time. On the other hand I’m pretty sure we won’t save it flicking on 24 lights in the middle of the day. Or mowing vast expanses of lawn 10 to 20 times a summer.
I was chatting with an acquaintance last week about the possibility of generating tidal power in the Bay of Fundy. One of the main problems, of course, is dealing with the cost of development and the higher cost of energy produced. “It all comes down to money,” he reckoned.
Money is one of those interesting commodities that tends to distort reality. “So,” I asked my friend, “what is money?” After tumbling it around a bit, he came up with “people energy.” And, in fact, that’s exactly what money is—a way of storing human energy. I’ve written about most of this before. In-of-itself, money has no intrinsic value at all. It’s not like food or water or energy. It’s merely a concept, a system of interlinking beliefs that we’ve all adopted to create an economy and to keep it running.
Today, that system has become so complex that we see it as a natural system, much like our food supply. And therein lies the danger. In service of money, we can soon overlook actual natural ecosystems, or worse, place monetary values over natural values. So money becomes more important than keeping enough fish in the sea, or keeping all of our workers employed. I know this sounds so simple it seems sophomoric. And yet most of our economy actually operates under these distorted premises.
I remember a conversation about the future health of our oceans and the damage done by trawlers with one of the executives of Clearwater Foods. He dismissed the idea outright, as if there were no lasting impacts at all. He spoke with the authority of a wealthy man.
Yet in the same issue of Scientific American there’s a satellite photo of a stretch of ocean visibly scarred by these same ocean trawlers, leaving long white strips of barren ocean floor in their wakes. Sadly, I have to say that I like haddock and had some last week. But this kind of pillaging for ocean food is starting to make me very uncomfortable. Perhaps I’ll have to become a vegetarian.
Becoming a vegetarian is exactly what the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader recommends, although for entirely different reasons. At least on the surface. Buddhism, according to the Dalai Lama, is all about ending suffering—and that suffering includes environmental suffering and the suffering of all beings. It is more moral to be a vegetarian than to impose suffering on higher order animals, he believes. But it turns out that his approach is also better for the planet, which is also a moral—and survival—issue.
Interestingly, the Dalai Lama also has a lot to say about wasting energy. According to him, wasting energy starts with bad thinking and undue attachment to material things. If we’re driven by envy and resentment we’re wasting energy that could be spent doing other things. Those other things, the Dali Lama says, should be aimed at helping others overcome their suffering, which to practicing Buddhists is the whole point of life, and leads to enlightenment—or clear thought.
That pursuit of clarity is a 2500-year-old mission that has great resonance today. When the Buddha lived there were less than 10 million people on Earth. Today, there are 6.8 billion and counting, and by 2050 there will be over 9 billion of us by recent estimates. If ever clarity were needed, it’s now.
And clearly there’s not a whole lot I can do personally about the world’s problems. But now that the rain’s stopped I’ll put on my shoes and go outside to pick up those bits of garbage along the roadside. Sure, they’ll still end up in a landfill, but at least I’ll feel better.
But we’d sure feel a whole lot better if we learned to design out the cycle of waste in the first place.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
On the fat of the land
©
The call hit one of those voice queues, and after a few key punches I finally got a live person on the line. Somehow I’d reached an Indian call centre instead of the local bank. Yes, he assured me, I had the right number and he could help me.
Turns out, he couldn’t. All I really needed was to reach one of my coworkers who’d dropped into the bank for a staff birthday party. While I waited for his return call, I hunted up my coworker’s cell number, found it and solved my own problem. But I was left wondering why my local bank was rerouting their calls to India.
We all know the answer: it’s cheaper to answer the phone in India than it is in our local office. Our bank can get by with one less receptionist. But that receptionist they don’t need is another unemployed local person who’s still looking for a job—or more likely given up looking for a job. Instead, he or she is sitting home watching the afternoon soaps or surfing the net.
Of course, unlike in India, nobody’s exactly starving here. Quite the contrary, despite the lack of jobs, there never seems to be a lack of food. In fact, a lot of people seem to be getting fat, whether they’re working or not. There could be a lot of reasons for that, but a major factor, I think, is the fact that most of us are connected to a computer screen. So much of our “real” work, physical work has been off-shored, that almost 80% of our Canadian workforce has been relegated to the service sector and its network of LCD screens. How can one stay physically active when one’s work depends on remaining almost entirely motionless?
I’m not trying to make excuses for fat people, though. After all, I’ve been putting on a little weight myself. I mean, I sympathize, but please, fat people should realize that they make the rest of us kind of uncomfortable. They really need to lose weight, not only for their own physical health, but for our aesthetic health too, don’t you think?
Well no, I don’t. And I read in the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago that some researchers beg to differ too. After doing some extensive research, they determined that being overweight doesn’t affect mortality rates one bit. They found out that even morbidly obese people live as long as the rest of us. In actual fact the folks most at risk for sudden death are skinny men. How about that for bursting a bubble?
What the researchers did conclude is that fat is the new class separator. Skinny people—those who can afford to work out I suppose—now automatically belong the new upper class. Fat people, those still chained to their work terminals, are the new lower class.
This attitude is pervasive. Males now judge almost every female by the state of her waistline, as if that were an indication of her female worth. Yet most of those same men are sorely out of shape themselves, droopy bellies and all.
To paraphrase the infamous John Lennon song: “fat is the nigger of the world.” Or at least that’s the way it is here in the ‘developed’ world. There was a time, and not that long ago, that heavier women were viewed to be far more attractive. A look back at the history of art gives a pretty good idea of what our forefathers thought was attractive. And skinny was definitely not it.
The reason fat is such an enemy of the urban fashionista is that food is now so plentiful and readily available that only those people without willpower or discipline are fat. What a load of crap. People are fat because the survival of our species favoured those of us who could actually store a little energy between widely spaced meals. Hell, today even our dogs and cats are fat—even the dogs and cats of skinny people.
Let’s call this aversion to fat what it really is—prejudice.
Interestingly, that same research study also found out that black people don’t look down as much on their fat brothers and sisters. Fat black people seem to be just fine as far as skinny black people are concerned. Black people are more “fat blind” than the rest of us. I mean, how cool is that?
In the future, if we do end up hitting a period of crashing supplies of fossil fuel, rising prices and food shortages, we may start to envy our weight prone friends, and that may start to make the skinny among us a little nervous. Thin may not be all that “in”.
It’s all probably a lot like men’s fashion. When times are tough new suits get a more generous cut and the lapels go wider. When times are good, the lapels shrink back down. Scarcity makes fat more attractive, abundance makes lean more appealing.
On an even more commercial note, the weight reduction industry has a seriously vested interest in keeping up the notion that fat is unhealthy, even though most of what they offer is totally ineffective for most people over the long haul, even though yo-yo dieting and weight gain, by all accounts is more dangerous than simply staying fat. But what is healthy, anyway?
That pair of eagles I see fishing I the river don’t look fat. The deer on Ministers Island look full at this time of year, but they don’t look fat. Feral cats and dogs running wild in the neighbourhood don’t look fat, either. There’s a wild animal health that comes from foraging and struggle. But us? We’re domesticated—even those of us who do work out.
Make that: especially those of us who work out. Workout freaks (as opposed to real workers) seem to have an artificial health, a sort of over-health that real workers don’t have. Real workers have a kind of lean and rangy look, more like wild animals. Workout addicts, on the other hand, have that constructed, “deliberately engineered” look.
This new body fashion began in the 1960s when modern affluence peaked. The youth movement dominated everything, and the ideal for both men and women was to look as much as a hyperactive 13-year-old as possible. But who knew we were all going to live so long?
Today we’re living longer, getting older and getting fatter. But our expectations continue to exceed our own reflections in the mirror.
The call hit one of those voice queues, and after a few key punches I finally got a live person on the line. Somehow I’d reached an Indian call centre instead of the local bank. Yes, he assured me, I had the right number and he could help me.
Turns out, he couldn’t. All I really needed was to reach one of my coworkers who’d dropped into the bank for a staff birthday party. While I waited for his return call, I hunted up my coworker’s cell number, found it and solved my own problem. But I was left wondering why my local bank was rerouting their calls to India.
We all know the answer: it’s cheaper to answer the phone in India than it is in our local office. Our bank can get by with one less receptionist. But that receptionist they don’t need is another unemployed local person who’s still looking for a job—or more likely given up looking for a job. Instead, he or she is sitting home watching the afternoon soaps or surfing the net.
Of course, unlike in India, nobody’s exactly starving here. Quite the contrary, despite the lack of jobs, there never seems to be a lack of food. In fact, a lot of people seem to be getting fat, whether they’re working or not. There could be a lot of reasons for that, but a major factor, I think, is the fact that most of us are connected to a computer screen. So much of our “real” work, physical work has been off-shored, that almost 80% of our Canadian workforce has been relegated to the service sector and its network of LCD screens. How can one stay physically active when one’s work depends on remaining almost entirely motionless?
I’m not trying to make excuses for fat people, though. After all, I’ve been putting on a little weight myself. I mean, I sympathize, but please, fat people should realize that they make the rest of us kind of uncomfortable. They really need to lose weight, not only for their own physical health, but for our aesthetic health too, don’t you think?
Well no, I don’t. And I read in the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago that some researchers beg to differ too. After doing some extensive research, they determined that being overweight doesn’t affect mortality rates one bit. They found out that even morbidly obese people live as long as the rest of us. In actual fact the folks most at risk for sudden death are skinny men. How about that for bursting a bubble?
What the researchers did conclude is that fat is the new class separator. Skinny people—those who can afford to work out I suppose—now automatically belong the new upper class. Fat people, those still chained to their work terminals, are the new lower class.
This attitude is pervasive. Males now judge almost every female by the state of her waistline, as if that were an indication of her female worth. Yet most of those same men are sorely out of shape themselves, droopy bellies and all.
To paraphrase the infamous John Lennon song: “fat is the nigger of the world.” Or at least that’s the way it is here in the ‘developed’ world. There was a time, and not that long ago, that heavier women were viewed to be far more attractive. A look back at the history of art gives a pretty good idea of what our forefathers thought was attractive. And skinny was definitely not it.
The reason fat is such an enemy of the urban fashionista is that food is now so plentiful and readily available that only those people without willpower or discipline are fat. What a load of crap. People are fat because the survival of our species favoured those of us who could actually store a little energy between widely spaced meals. Hell, today even our dogs and cats are fat—even the dogs and cats of skinny people.
Let’s call this aversion to fat what it really is—prejudice.
Interestingly, that same research study also found out that black people don’t look down as much on their fat brothers and sisters. Fat black people seem to be just fine as far as skinny black people are concerned. Black people are more “fat blind” than the rest of us. I mean, how cool is that?
In the future, if we do end up hitting a period of crashing supplies of fossil fuel, rising prices and food shortages, we may start to envy our weight prone friends, and that may start to make the skinny among us a little nervous. Thin may not be all that “in”.
It’s all probably a lot like men’s fashion. When times are tough new suits get a more generous cut and the lapels go wider. When times are good, the lapels shrink back down. Scarcity makes fat more attractive, abundance makes lean more appealing.
On an even more commercial note, the weight reduction industry has a seriously vested interest in keeping up the notion that fat is unhealthy, even though most of what they offer is totally ineffective for most people over the long haul, even though yo-yo dieting and weight gain, by all accounts is more dangerous than simply staying fat. But what is healthy, anyway?
That pair of eagles I see fishing I the river don’t look fat. The deer on Ministers Island look full at this time of year, but they don’t look fat. Feral cats and dogs running wild in the neighbourhood don’t look fat, either. There’s a wild animal health that comes from foraging and struggle. But us? We’re domesticated—even those of us who do work out.
Make that: especially those of us who work out. Workout freaks (as opposed to real workers) seem to have an artificial health, a sort of over-health that real workers don’t have. Real workers have a kind of lean and rangy look, more like wild animals. Workout addicts, on the other hand, have that constructed, “deliberately engineered” look.
This new body fashion began in the 1960s when modern affluence peaked. The youth movement dominated everything, and the ideal for both men and women was to look as much as a hyperactive 13-year-old as possible. But who knew we were all going to live so long?
Today we’re living longer, getting older and getting fatter. But our expectations continue to exceed our own reflections in the mirror.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Nomads on the river’s edge
©
The distant crack of a gunshot woke me from a fitful sleep. I’d been reading and napping after dinner. I looked out the window. It was dark. Another burst of gunfire echoed in the distance. What the hell was going on out there, I wondered.
The night sky lit up with purple and gold starbursts as I joined the kids on the front lawn. We waited a minute and another huge burst of fireworks exploded into the heavy sky. No, I thought, still trying to clear my head, not a civic holiday, that would have been last weekend. It must be a part of Chocolate Festival, I thought, as another firework launched, then blossomed into a shimmering white sphere hanging over the St. Croix River.
I’d just walked along that waterfront a couple of evenings ago. The sun was setting, lighting up the clouds with soft rose and orange halos. It was low tide, and deep rivulets from ancient underground streams leaking out from underneath the town had veined and etched down into the glossy riverbed mud. The river itself was reduced to a narrow golden channel in the middle of the mudflat. The rows of pier pilings from the old wharfs poked out of the mud, reminding me of all the industry that must have once been here. I kept walking. A nose full of swamp gas—methane—came wafting across from the old sewage lagoon the Town crews have been filling in for the past few months.
Rivers have always been our first frontiers. Our ancestors first came for the fish, then used the rivers as highways, then later as sewers for their towns and industries. The St. Croix and the town of St. Stephen are a part of that old story. It’s ironic that tonight’s fireworks are celebrating the last remaining original factory here. I’d like to think that maybe the river is celebrating its freedom.
Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here in this part of the world with these fussy, conservative people. More than work, my kids draw me into community life. I meet the moms and the dads at Cubs and golf lessons and art classes. Often the conversations seem strained, the parents calibrating the other parents and kids. ‘Do these fit with mine?’ the silences between the words seem to ask.
Then I see the ridge people come in for the Thursday night concert in Town Square and the Friday morning market along the river in their old pickup trucks. I get them. There’s just a good gospel song or country tune, or handmade dolls with gingham smocks for sale. Life is simple.
But then again, everything gets a little more complicated, even on a riverfront walk. I have a daydreaming moment. As I pass by a shiny new Ford truck, its massive 3-bar grille turns into a clenched chrome fist poised to pound the air. It’s an assault weapon. I mean that’s it. I’m both attracted to and repelled by the truck, and I start to think about every thing that grille is gonna flatten. No matter, I think, life will flatten all of us, anyway. But a new pickup truck will always be a local status symbol.
Status and social distinctions are a real force here. We should know. Since moving here we’ve been house nomads traveling up and down the river. First we lived in St. Stephen, then in St. Andrews, then back to St. Stephen. Now we may be moving back to St. Andrews. There’s a tension between these two towns, the gritty, working class St. Stephen and pretentious, gentrified St. Andrews that affects everything. And honestly, I can’t say that I like one better than the other.
I don’t know how much tonight’s fireworks cost, or who funded them, but I do know that the finale was simply the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. Explosion piled on explosion in rapid-fire sequence. And it sparked a thought about St. Stephen. For the first time I saw a glimpse of greatness in this town, a greatness that must have been here when all those wharfs were still standing along the riverfront. There was an enthusiasm in that display I’ve been missing.
I’m conflicted about this idea of greatness, though. Was St. Stephen a greater place when it was a thriving industry town? Was it greater when its industry polluted the river? Or mowed down the old growth forests to make the ships and the axe handles? Or dammed the river for power? Or is it greater now, when its people depend less on the river and the local environment?
It’s not a local thought. It’s global. And it depends on whether one sees greatness in human achievement or in the living natural environment. Years ago the Victorians thought the rugged Rocky Mountains were ugly. Today we find them beautifully compelling. Today we think the glowing rivers of city light radiating into the night sky are beautiful. Will we think so in the future? We, all of us, are rapidly coming to an intersection between human activity and the planet’s capacity to modify that activity.
So here I am, nearing the end of a column with a thousand unwritten questions and no answers. What kind of work can we do that doesn’t finish off what’s left of our environment? Can we do that when over 75% of our workers are in the service sector and when most of our “real” skills have been outsourced overseas? Can we even model our own impact on, say, the coastal fishery, let alone the effects of climate change? Can this little corner of the world get over its parochial class distinctions and actually begin to dream up new, innovative ideas for the future? Am I walking the walk in my own work? In my own life?
To add to the confusion I keep reading. This week it’s an old book: ‘Unfit to Manage’ published back in 1988. Interestingly, the author forecasted the present financial crisis. There’s great stuff in that book. He details the union-busting tactics of U.S. corporations, the massive transfer of jobs, mid-management functions and R&D offshore, the overwhelming greed of top executives—and despite all the pressures, the resourcefulness and productivity of the ordinary American worker. There’s always hope, he writes.
Meanwhile we all keep moving along with the river. This time, for us, it’s downstream.
The distant crack of a gunshot woke me from a fitful sleep. I’d been reading and napping after dinner. I looked out the window. It was dark. Another burst of gunfire echoed in the distance. What the hell was going on out there, I wondered.
The night sky lit up with purple and gold starbursts as I joined the kids on the front lawn. We waited a minute and another huge burst of fireworks exploded into the heavy sky. No, I thought, still trying to clear my head, not a civic holiday, that would have been last weekend. It must be a part of Chocolate Festival, I thought, as another firework launched, then blossomed into a shimmering white sphere hanging over the St. Croix River.
I’d just walked along that waterfront a couple of evenings ago. The sun was setting, lighting up the clouds with soft rose and orange halos. It was low tide, and deep rivulets from ancient underground streams leaking out from underneath the town had veined and etched down into the glossy riverbed mud. The river itself was reduced to a narrow golden channel in the middle of the mudflat. The rows of pier pilings from the old wharfs poked out of the mud, reminding me of all the industry that must have once been here. I kept walking. A nose full of swamp gas—methane—came wafting across from the old sewage lagoon the Town crews have been filling in for the past few months.
Rivers have always been our first frontiers. Our ancestors first came for the fish, then used the rivers as highways, then later as sewers for their towns and industries. The St. Croix and the town of St. Stephen are a part of that old story. It’s ironic that tonight’s fireworks are celebrating the last remaining original factory here. I’d like to think that maybe the river is celebrating its freedom.
Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here in this part of the world with these fussy, conservative people. More than work, my kids draw me into community life. I meet the moms and the dads at Cubs and golf lessons and art classes. Often the conversations seem strained, the parents calibrating the other parents and kids. ‘Do these fit with mine?’ the silences between the words seem to ask.
Then I see the ridge people come in for the Thursday night concert in Town Square and the Friday morning market along the river in their old pickup trucks. I get them. There’s just a good gospel song or country tune, or handmade dolls with gingham smocks for sale. Life is simple.
But then again, everything gets a little more complicated, even on a riverfront walk. I have a daydreaming moment. As I pass by a shiny new Ford truck, its massive 3-bar grille turns into a clenched chrome fist poised to pound the air. It’s an assault weapon. I mean that’s it. I’m both attracted to and repelled by the truck, and I start to think about every thing that grille is gonna flatten. No matter, I think, life will flatten all of us, anyway. But a new pickup truck will always be a local status symbol.
Status and social distinctions are a real force here. We should know. Since moving here we’ve been house nomads traveling up and down the river. First we lived in St. Stephen, then in St. Andrews, then back to St. Stephen. Now we may be moving back to St. Andrews. There’s a tension between these two towns, the gritty, working class St. Stephen and pretentious, gentrified St. Andrews that affects everything. And honestly, I can’t say that I like one better than the other.
I don’t know how much tonight’s fireworks cost, or who funded them, but I do know that the finale was simply the best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. Explosion piled on explosion in rapid-fire sequence. And it sparked a thought about St. Stephen. For the first time I saw a glimpse of greatness in this town, a greatness that must have been here when all those wharfs were still standing along the riverfront. There was an enthusiasm in that display I’ve been missing.
I’m conflicted about this idea of greatness, though. Was St. Stephen a greater place when it was a thriving industry town? Was it greater when its industry polluted the river? Or mowed down the old growth forests to make the ships and the axe handles? Or dammed the river for power? Or is it greater now, when its people depend less on the river and the local environment?
It’s not a local thought. It’s global. And it depends on whether one sees greatness in human achievement or in the living natural environment. Years ago the Victorians thought the rugged Rocky Mountains were ugly. Today we find them beautifully compelling. Today we think the glowing rivers of city light radiating into the night sky are beautiful. Will we think so in the future? We, all of us, are rapidly coming to an intersection between human activity and the planet’s capacity to modify that activity.
So here I am, nearing the end of a column with a thousand unwritten questions and no answers. What kind of work can we do that doesn’t finish off what’s left of our environment? Can we do that when over 75% of our workers are in the service sector and when most of our “real” skills have been outsourced overseas? Can we even model our own impact on, say, the coastal fishery, let alone the effects of climate change? Can this little corner of the world get over its parochial class distinctions and actually begin to dream up new, innovative ideas for the future? Am I walking the walk in my own work? In my own life?
To add to the confusion I keep reading. This week it’s an old book: ‘Unfit to Manage’ published back in 1988. Interestingly, the author forecasted the present financial crisis. There’s great stuff in that book. He details the union-busting tactics of U.S. corporations, the massive transfer of jobs, mid-management functions and R&D offshore, the overwhelming greed of top executives—and despite all the pressures, the resourcefulness and productivity of the ordinary American worker. There’s always hope, he writes.
Meanwhile we all keep moving along with the river. This time, for us, it’s downstream.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
A simply complicated world
©
“I have to pee,” my youngest son Marshall lisped, matter-of-factly through his missing front tooth. I looked up and down the deserted forest trail. “Go ahead,” I said. He moved over to the edge of the trail, pulled down his pants and started…poo-ing. “Jeez. Crouch down,” I urged, making sure he didn’t poop into his shorts.
It took several trips up the trail and as many huge handfuls of fern fronds to get his bottom cleaned. By that time the rest of our crew was well ahead of us. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to move quickly enough to catch up to the others. I gave up trying. Using one hand to hold his, I used the other to point and shoot the borrowed camera, taking beauty shots of the shoreline as we hiked up the moss-covered laneways of Ministers Island.
At every fork in the trail I began to feel a little more desperate about not being able to catch up to the others. “Did I take the right turn?” I wondered. Finally, half way up the coast we came to a clearing. A stately older gentleman, his face looking flushed in the heat under his canary-yellow ball hat, was crossing the field, and as he looked up I recognized him, a friend and neighbour of the island. He introduced himself to Marshall, and as we talked I glanced at the shore. “The tide must be coming in,” I thought. So when my friend suggested that we jump in his boat for a quick ride back, I agreed.
The tide had indeed started racing in. As we rounded the point, I could see the island gatehouse in the distance, and as I squinted my eyes into the sun, I thought I could also see a police car. As we got closer, I could see that it was. “Damn,” I thought. “Our walking crew must have thought we were lost.”
The police car wasn’t there for us. Some tourists had managed to get their car stuck in the soft gravel of the ocean-bed bar road. I could see the tow-truck hiding behind the RCMP car as we tied up at the dock. Half of our walking crew was also there, waiting for us, wondering what had happened. The Marshall poo-story was excuse enough.
I usually love getting out on a hiking trail. It’s a time to chill, a chance to get away from a week full of busy-work and noisy thoughts. It hasn’t been that kind of summer. With too many projects on the go it seems like the noisy mental chatter won’t quit. That’s the thing about work, it can quickly become all-consuming, and by the time you notice, you’re already racing for the finish line. And there’s only one finish line in life—the end. Hurry up and stop. Dead.
Contradictions like those tend to catch my attention. For example, mid-week I was Skyping an old friend in the UK about technology and communications. He’s a big fan of Buckminster Fuller, and he knows I’m a big fan of McLuhan (the communications guru who coined the phrase “global village.”) Fuller was a proponent of using high tech materials to redesign human habitat and transportation. I told my friend about some research my nephew had just done on one of these miracle materials—stainless steel. My nephew had been influenced by the negative buzz on plastic water bottles and bought himself a new stainless steel one. Then it occurred to him. Just how much energy went into making that stainless steel bottle? After a little math, it turned out that the stainless steel was a huge energy hog, a 10 to the 5th power greater energy hog.
I told my English friend that maybe Fuller was wrong. Maybe he’d been right in his notion of applying smarter design, but wrong in his approach to actually doing it. Perhaps, I joked, McLuhan was at least Fuller’s equal. This brought us around to communications. It occurred to me that—while we have more media than ever before in the history of the planet all working so very hard to get our attention—never before have we paid so little attention to the media. There’s so much competing for our attention, we’re bored to tears.
This tension between attention and inattention, if you’ll excuse me, caught my attention. What else could have this front-back duality? It occurred to me that politicians use it often. Somehow they’ve learned to occupy that ‘no-man’s-land’ of tension between action and inaction, often promising action while practicing long periods of inaction. It must be a workable technique. While it frustrates those voters who want action, it probably soothes those voters who oppose the action, or are merely undecided.
Writers like John Ralston Saul, I remembered, are very much aware of duality. Saul views our rational, scientific society as completely irrational, and suggests that we should begin to embrace the irrational side of life as a tonic for our modern ailments (such as our addition to work, for one).
There are other contradictions. We’ve all seen people who overcompensate—acting with boundless confidence—to mask hidden inadequacies. But it comes up in societal behaviour, too. In the aftermath of the financial meltdown we question modern business practices. In the midst of the random chaos, where’s the soul, the spiritual rudder, we wonder.
In many ways modern life appears to be almost random. I mean how does one explain weird news stories like a woman killing a pregnant woman to steal her unborn baby? For millennia societies used the power of religion and ritual to maintain a cohesive social direction. Without religion, where do we find the guidelines? Without religion, everything was random. And maybe still is.
That tension between the randomness of organic life and the security and order of ritual is the foundation of all religions. Stopping ourselves from giving in to random urges, acts that might disrupt social harmony—has been an enduring problem.
Ritual is also something more, something more elementary. Ritual has always been a tool, like poetry, to help our ancestors deal with the vastness and randomness of the world, to help transfer this knowledge to the next generation.
And it’s still a complicated world. “Or it’s that simple,” I thought as I rubbed aloe gel on the sunburned shoulders of my two boys. “It’s just nice to get out and enjoy the summer sun for a change.” Especially when I can stop thinking for a few minutes.
“I have to pee,” my youngest son Marshall lisped, matter-of-factly through his missing front tooth. I looked up and down the deserted forest trail. “Go ahead,” I said. He moved over to the edge of the trail, pulled down his pants and started…poo-ing. “Jeez. Crouch down,” I urged, making sure he didn’t poop into his shorts.
It took several trips up the trail and as many huge handfuls of fern fronds to get his bottom cleaned. By that time the rest of our crew was well ahead of us. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to move quickly enough to catch up to the others. I gave up trying. Using one hand to hold his, I used the other to point and shoot the borrowed camera, taking beauty shots of the shoreline as we hiked up the moss-covered laneways of Ministers Island.
At every fork in the trail I began to feel a little more desperate about not being able to catch up to the others. “Did I take the right turn?” I wondered. Finally, half way up the coast we came to a clearing. A stately older gentleman, his face looking flushed in the heat under his canary-yellow ball hat, was crossing the field, and as he looked up I recognized him, a friend and neighbour of the island. He introduced himself to Marshall, and as we talked I glanced at the shore. “The tide must be coming in,” I thought. So when my friend suggested that we jump in his boat for a quick ride back, I agreed.
The tide had indeed started racing in. As we rounded the point, I could see the island gatehouse in the distance, and as I squinted my eyes into the sun, I thought I could also see a police car. As we got closer, I could see that it was. “Damn,” I thought. “Our walking crew must have thought we were lost.”
The police car wasn’t there for us. Some tourists had managed to get their car stuck in the soft gravel of the ocean-bed bar road. I could see the tow-truck hiding behind the RCMP car as we tied up at the dock. Half of our walking crew was also there, waiting for us, wondering what had happened. The Marshall poo-story was excuse enough.
I usually love getting out on a hiking trail. It’s a time to chill, a chance to get away from a week full of busy-work and noisy thoughts. It hasn’t been that kind of summer. With too many projects on the go it seems like the noisy mental chatter won’t quit. That’s the thing about work, it can quickly become all-consuming, and by the time you notice, you’re already racing for the finish line. And there’s only one finish line in life—the end. Hurry up and stop. Dead.
Contradictions like those tend to catch my attention. For example, mid-week I was Skyping an old friend in the UK about technology and communications. He’s a big fan of Buckminster Fuller, and he knows I’m a big fan of McLuhan (the communications guru who coined the phrase “global village.”) Fuller was a proponent of using high tech materials to redesign human habitat and transportation. I told my friend about some research my nephew had just done on one of these miracle materials—stainless steel. My nephew had been influenced by the negative buzz on plastic water bottles and bought himself a new stainless steel one. Then it occurred to him. Just how much energy went into making that stainless steel bottle? After a little math, it turned out that the stainless steel was a huge energy hog, a 10 to the 5th power greater energy hog.
I told my English friend that maybe Fuller was wrong. Maybe he’d been right in his notion of applying smarter design, but wrong in his approach to actually doing it. Perhaps, I joked, McLuhan was at least Fuller’s equal. This brought us around to communications. It occurred to me that—while we have more media than ever before in the history of the planet all working so very hard to get our attention—never before have we paid so little attention to the media. There’s so much competing for our attention, we’re bored to tears.
This tension between attention and inattention, if you’ll excuse me, caught my attention. What else could have this front-back duality? It occurred to me that politicians use it often. Somehow they’ve learned to occupy that ‘no-man’s-land’ of tension between action and inaction, often promising action while practicing long periods of inaction. It must be a workable technique. While it frustrates those voters who want action, it probably soothes those voters who oppose the action, or are merely undecided.
Writers like John Ralston Saul, I remembered, are very much aware of duality. Saul views our rational, scientific society as completely irrational, and suggests that we should begin to embrace the irrational side of life as a tonic for our modern ailments (such as our addition to work, for one).
There are other contradictions. We’ve all seen people who overcompensate—acting with boundless confidence—to mask hidden inadequacies. But it comes up in societal behaviour, too. In the aftermath of the financial meltdown we question modern business practices. In the midst of the random chaos, where’s the soul, the spiritual rudder, we wonder.
In many ways modern life appears to be almost random. I mean how does one explain weird news stories like a woman killing a pregnant woman to steal her unborn baby? For millennia societies used the power of religion and ritual to maintain a cohesive social direction. Without religion, where do we find the guidelines? Without religion, everything was random. And maybe still is.
That tension between the randomness of organic life and the security and order of ritual is the foundation of all religions. Stopping ourselves from giving in to random urges, acts that might disrupt social harmony—has been an enduring problem.
Ritual is also something more, something more elementary. Ritual has always been a tool, like poetry, to help our ancestors deal with the vastness and randomness of the world, to help transfer this knowledge to the next generation.
And it’s still a complicated world. “Or it’s that simple,” I thought as I rubbed aloe gel on the sunburned shoulders of my two boys. “It’s just nice to get out and enjoy the summer sun for a change.” Especially when I can stop thinking for a few minutes.
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