Gather in the dark.
Set fires of ancestral bone.
Huddle close
To hear each other breathe.
Fold your hairs in theirs.
Ensure hot tears fall
on each other’s cheeks.
Here’s another suggestion to replace all those solutions and grand schemes. Or maybe it’s just a good place to start them from.
Stay close to your family and friends. I mean really close.
This may sound obvious to you. But as an autistic Englishman in Aotearoa New Zealand it certainly hasn’t been for me.
One of the most evil things industrial civilisation has done is the extent to which it has parted human from human. One aspect of that is that whatever your view of prehistory, or even pre-industrial history, it’s pretty clear that people spent a lot more time with their families and close clan then than they did in the factories, or do now.
We send our children away to a learning factory at five years of age so we can spend more time at work. We segregate our old people so we can have very little to do with them. Then we can go on working until it’s our turn for the “care (from strangers) home”. That’s even before we consider how much time we abandon each other to the screens.
We’re convinced this is the only way to ‘get on’, to pay the bills and acquire the things and security we want. But we’ve robbed ourselves of core aspects of the human experience. They are possibly as important as the processes of giving birth and having children at all. In order to be materially rich we’re pursuing the fool’s gold of an impoverished life.
When many of us talk of quality of life, our minds tend to go only to the highlights reel. We think of parties, weddings, holidays, great sex, whatever. It was the photo album, now it might be the social media feed. But there’s a deeper quality that intertwines with quantity. The trails, tribulations and traumas of lives that braid together through time. The tissues and the scar tissue.
Uninterrupted decades of doing much the same relatively safe thing lubricated with lots of food and booze is not a quality life, any more than watching the same show every day is quality television. Being lucky or naïve enough to risk having children adds something important. It provides a link to our timeless ancestry and the truly biological basis of our being. It creates a good lot of healthy chaos in our lives. It can also be the prompt for deeper concerns, about mortality, time and legacy. But most of us modern parents are so distracted and busy we miss most of the experience. We might find ourselves daydreaming instead of when they will leave, so that we can get back to our hobbies. But by the time that happens most of our lives, in every sense, have ebbed away.
The other isolator is our ambition, even, importantly, the ambition to do good. Or maybe more accurately, our delusions of grandeur. The belief that somehow I am important, that my genius is there, only waiting to be recognised.
As a man with a particular interest in world affairs and the environment I’ve spent year after year looking away from my wife and children and off into the smouldering distance. It has been, at best, a high risk strategy. It’s like not getting a proper job because you think you’re going to play in the premiership. Or maybe it’s more like pathetically mimicking the narcissism of fame in the hope that somehow that will transport me from anonymity.
I don’t regret trying to bring larger horizons into our lives. I do regret not tending the small, beautiful thing that is my family well enough. But I think that’s not really something our culture idolises.
When was the last time we all flocked to the cinema to see: “Hero Dad Puts the Bins Out While Everyone Else is Safely in Bed.” Most of the heroes only care for children in a moment of flinching ruggedly early in the movie. Then they settle down to an hour and a half of wholesale slaughtering hoards of other people’s parents.
If there has to be a choice between the two - our families or our egoic heroic images of ourselves - then this should be no choice at all. I was supposed to have made that choice when I got married, but I thought I didn’t have to. Instead I thought, as in so many things in modern life, that I could have my cake and eat it too. I could carry on the lifestyle of a globetrotting environmentalist and raise a decent family at the same time. Well, sometimes it feels like there’s not much left but crumbs now. I am trying to talk myself into developing the focus to savour them more and be more grateful for and to them.
According to some sources Gandhi was a crap Dad. He was only 18 when his first son Harilal was born. Gandhi left his family in South Africa for three years to train as a barrister in London when the kid was only 18 months old. According to a book by Ghandi’s grandson, Gandhi junior’s entire life was lived in Dad’s shadow. He spent it rebelling against everything his father believed in. While his teetotal old man rocked the sheet and sandals look and led boycotts of foreign goods, he became an alcoholic gambler trading in British clothes.
Che Gauvara wasn’t great either. He divorced his first wife and went off to start a civil war when their daughter was three. He had four children with his second wife, but went off to start other civil wars and got himself killed when the oldest of them was seven.
I hugely admire many aspects of these men. But seeing your Dad on a stamp doesn’t tend to make you feel as secure and sane as playing horsey with them, or snuggling up in bed to read stories about talking bears. So wanting to be like them might come with some drawbacks for people like me, and our families. And in return I have about as much chance of having their kind of impact as a garden gnome has of becoming world tennis champion.
And this definitely happens to more normal people. My Dad was a fireman. He was probably an anonymous hero to many, but he was a stranger to me. When he wasn’t saving people from house fires and car crashes he was doing part time work as a courier to stay out of the house. I think he struggled with family life at least as much as I do. The idea of him is still heroic to me, but I have almost nothing to attach it to.
I have a few friends in what might be called ‘alternative’ circles who have broken up family units, at least in part because they felt they were cramping their freewheeling lifestyles. I myself have come perilously close to doing the same. I have other, more ‘conventional’ friends, who’ve worked menial jobs and night shifts to hold their families together when things got tough. Which ones are the real heroes?
Can you name any truly radical revolutionaries who have managed this kind of domestic heroism too? To me it seems the sort of vision, commitment and missionary zeal that makes real transformational change possible very often leads to a focus a long way from home.
Think global but act local is a great slogan, but taking a genuine interest in global issues can easily have us taking our eyes off the ball being kicked by our giggling toddler. I know because I’ve done it.
But in the times that are coming, we probably won’t be able to rely on anyone else but those tied by bonds of love and blood to help us have a secure and joyful future. I’ve proved this before. I was once part of a loosely organised eco-pagan flavoured ‘tribe’ of traditional woodland workers. In a few years we built some of the tightest bonds of brotherhood, sisterhood and shared mission I have ever been privileged enough to experience. But in a few more short years a succession of relationships and circumstances disbanded us to the four corners of the globe. Those bonds might still hold for some of us in a crisis, but in the meantime the world slowly grinds you down individually and alone between the odd phone call and DM.
Maybe I am finally noticing this because all this hasn’t come naturally to me. Or maybe it’s because the other day I started experiencing the sort of symptoms that turned my Dad green, before erasing him from the planet.
I was fucking terrified. Weeping uncontrollably at random terrified. Terry Pratchett (who I met once at a book signing) once wrote that people say life flashes before your eyes just before you die, and it does, it’s called life. This is a jolly joke until you really look down the barrel at it, as he had to, and I felt like I was.
From the pains in my abdomen I imagined I could feel tumours blooming like cauliflowers inside me. For the next 48 long hours I scrabbled around grabbing desperately at the industrialised privileges of blood tests and ultrasounds. I was, in my own mind at least, knocking on death’s door and wondering whether I would have time to run away before he answered. My entire existence was reduced to the first words out of a doctor’s mouth the next Monday morning.
And suddenly, inevitably, all the environmental endeavours I had ever attempted, all the aid work, the activism, the writing, didn’t mean shit. More than that, it felt like it never had, and never would. All that mattered to me was that soon, very soon, I would never see my family again.
Maybe this was it, my low point. Lying on my side with my greying chest hairs gakked with gel while a computer screen measured up something at 11cm (my kidney) that I thought was a tumour. And I knew that in a few seconds, they would tell me that I was going to die after months of extreme discomfort and abject terror.
And then the relief. I stood in an alleyway outside the clinic, crying behind my hands and fervently thanked the god I have no organised belief in for the gift of gallstones.
A while later I Googled what gallbladders do, wondering why mine had gone wrong.
Gallbladders, of course, make bile.
So good Andy. Glad you're on the mend after that roller-coaster. Many similarities to my own journey and I'm so glad I've had the opportunity to connect deeply with my family these last few years. I don't want my kids to ever leave home.
We've actually arrived at think local and act local although of course global issues are impacting our present and future. But I do believe that in the not too distant future our Monkeyspheres will be drastically scaled back to a range consisting of immediate (as in those in the same household) family and neighbours. As a father my mantra is "what physical and emotional legacy can I leave my kids and possible future grandkids for doing well in that radically relocalised way of life?"
Damn, Andy!
Cutting to the heart of the matter... Capitalism champions the individual, whether it be individual 'brilliance' or individual 'choice'. It seems to me that what you're saying is that contemporary life is designed to separate us from the people around us, and to seek meaning in the 'stuff'.
When in reality meaning is all around us, in the family we care for, in the friends we will do anything for, and workmates we help move house on the weekend.
If we focused on those relationships and how our actions affected them, perhaps that would be all we needed?