Have a gorgeous Saturday smile!
Category: Health
The book! Part Five: Stillness
The last quality that I want to write about, as in the last quality that I see in our dogs that we humans should learn, is about stillness. There was a very deliberate reason to make it the last one. But, if you will forgive me, I’m not going to explain why until near the end.
Stillness! The dog is the master of being still. Being still, either from just laying quietly watching the world go by, so to speak, or being still from being fast asleep. The ease at which they can find a space on a settee, a carpeted corner of a room, the covers of a made-up bed, and stretch out and be still, simply beggars belief. Dogs offer us humans the most wonderful quality of stillness that we should all practice. Dogs reveal their wonderful relationship with stillness.
In the August of 2014, TED Talks published a talk by Pico Iyer. Despite the uncommon name, Pico Iyer was not a person I had heard of before. A quick search revealed that he was a British-born essayist and novelist of Indian origin. Apparently, Pico is the author of a number of books on crossing cultures and has been an essayist for Time Magazine since 1986. Pico Iyer’s TED Talk was called: The art of stillness.
It was utterly riveting. In a little over fifteen minutes, Pico’s talk touched on something that so many of us feel, probably even yearn for: the need for space and stillness in our minds. Stillness to offset the increasingly excessive movement and distractions of our modern world. Or to use Pico’s words:”Almost everybody I know has this sense of overdosing on information and getting dizzy living at post-human speeds.”
Now Pico has clearly been a great traveller and the list of countries and places he has visited was impressive. From Kyoto to Tibet, from Cuba to North Korea, from Bhutan to Easter Island; a man having grown up both being a part of, and yet apart from, the English, American and Indian cultures. Yet of all the places this man has been to he tops them all with what he discovers in stillness: “… that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba.”
Here are Pico Iyer’s own words from that TED Talk. Firstly:
And by going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season, or even, as some people do, a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions.
Then a few moments later, him saying:
And of course, this is what wise beings through the centuries from every tradition have been telling us. It’s an old idea. More than 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were reminding us it’s not our experience that makes our lives, it’s what we do with it.
….
And this has certainly been my experience as a traveler. Twenty-four years ago I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea. But the trip lasted a few days. What I’ve done with it sitting still, going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking, that’s lasted 24 years already and will probably last a lifetime. The trip, in other words, gave me some amazing sights, but it’s only sitting still that allows me to turn those into lasting insights. And I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads, in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation, that if I really want to change my life I might best begin by changing my mind.
Emails, ‘smartphones’, telephone handsets all around the house, television, junk mail on an almost daily basis, advertising in all its many forms, always lists of things to do; and on and on. It’s as if in this modern life, with the so many wonderful ways of doing stuff, connecting, being entertained, and more, that we have forgotten how to do the most basic and fundamental of things: Nothing! It’s as if so many of us have lost sight of the greatest luxury of all: immersing ourselves in that empty space of doing nothing.
Thus it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that more and more people are taking conscious and deliberate measures to open up a space inside their lives. Whether it is something as simple as listening to some music just before they go to sleep, because those that do notice that they sleep much better and wake up much refreshed, or taking technology ‘holidays’ during the week, or attending Yoga classes or enrolling on a course to learn Transcendental Meditation, there is a growing awareness that something in us is crying out for the sense of intimacy and depth that we get from people who take the time and trouble to sit still, to go nowhere.
Even science supports the benefits of slowing down the brain. In an article[1] posted on the Big Think blogsite, author Steven Kottler explains what are called ‘flow states’: “a person in flow obtains the ability to keenly hone their focus on the task at hand so that everything else disappears.”
Elaborating in the next paragraph, as follows:
“So our sense of self, our sense of self-consciousness, they vanish. Time dilates which means sometimes it slows down. You get that freeze frame effect familiar to any of you who have seen The Matrix or been in a car crash. Sometimes it speeds up and five hours will pass by in like five minutes. And throughout all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof.”
The part of our brain known as the prefrontal cortex houses our higher cognitive functions such as our sense of morality, our sense of will, and our sense of self. It is also that part of our brain that calculates time. When we experience flow states or what is technically known as ‘transient hypofrontality’, we lose track of time, lose our grip on assessing the past, present, and future. As Kotler explains it, “we’re plunged into what researchers call the deep now.”
Steven Kotler then goes on to say:
“So what causes transient hypofrontality? It was once assumed that flow states are an affliction reserved only for schizophrenics and drug addicts, but in the early 2000s a researcher named Aaron Dietrich realized that transient hypofrontality underpins every altered state — from dreaming to mindfulness to psychedelic trips and everything in between. Sometimes these altered states involve other parts of the brain shutting down. For example, when the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex disconnects, your sense of self-doubt and the brain’s inner critic get silenced. This results in boosted states of confidence and creativity.”
Don’t worry about the technical terms, just go back and re-read those last two sentences, “For example, when the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex disconnects, your sense of self-doubt and the brain’s inner critic get silenced. This results in boosted states of confidence and creativity.”
All from stillness!
Back to Pico Iyer’s talk and his concluding words:
So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still. So you can go on your next vacation to Paris or Hawaii, or New Orleans; I bet you’ll have a wonderful time. But, if you want to come back home alive and full of fresh hope, in love with the world, I think you might want to try considering going nowhere. Thank you.
At the start of this chapter, I mentioned that I would leave it until the end to explain why I deliberately made this one on stillness the last one in the series of dog qualities we humans have to learn.
Here’s why. For the fundamental reason that it is only through the stillness of mind, the stillness of mind that we so beautifully experience when we hug our dog, or close our eyes and bury our face in our dog’s warm fur; it is that stillness of mind, that like any profound spiritual experience, that has the power to transform our mind from negative to positive, from disturbed to peaceful, from unhappy to happy.
The power of overcoming negative minds and cultivating constructive thoughts, of experiencing transforming meditations is right next to us in the souls of our dogs.
“Sanctuary is where you go to cherish your life. It’s where you practice being present. And it may not be that many steps from where you are, right now.” The Rev. Terry Hershey.
1,523 words. Copyright © 2014 Paul Handover
[1] http://bigthink.com/think-tank/steven-kotler-flow-states
We are in and of nature itself!
Yet another powerful essay from George Monbiot.
I wonder at times why the most obvious things about us humans can be so easily overlooked. I have in mind that we humans are a product of a natural world, that we cannot survive without nature; however we examine our lives.
Take, for example, this picture of a city spread, in this case Chicago, where one might expect the natural world to be practically out of sight, reduced to a single point, metaphorically speaking. Yet nature is still hanging on, albeit courtesy of some local gardeners, I don’t doubt.
All of which is my introduction to yet another powerful essay from George Monbiot, republished here with his very kind permission.
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Civilisation is Boring
December 9, 2014
We are pre-tuned to the natural world; wired to respond to nature.
By George Monbiot, published on BBC Earth, 8th December 2014
This is the first of BBC Earth’s longform essays about our relationship with the natural world.
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds,” the pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote. “An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”(1)
I remembered that when I read the news that the world has lost 52% of its vertebrate wildlife over the past 40 years(2). It’s a figure from which I’m still reeling. To love the natural world is to suffer a series of griefs, each compounding the last. It is to be overtaken by disbelief that we could treat it in this fashion. And, in the darkest moments, it is to succumb to helplessness, to the conviction that we will keep eroding our world of wonders until almost nothing of it remains. There is hope – real hope – as I will explain later, but at times like this it seems remote.
These wounds are inflicted not only on the world’s wildlife but also on ourselves. Civilisation is but a flimsy dust sheet that we have thrown over a psyche rich in emotion and instinct, shaped by the living planet. The hominims from whom we evolved inhabited a fascinating, terrifying world, in which survival depended on constant observation and interpretation. They contended not only with lions and leopards, but with sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyaenas and bear dogs (monstrous creatures with a huge bite radius).
As the work of Professor Blaire van Valkenburgh at UCLA suggests, predators in the pre-human past lived at much greater densities than they do today(3). The wear and breakage of their teeth show that competition was so intense that they were forced to consume the entire carcasses of the animals they killed, bones and all, rather than just the prime cuts, as top carnivores tend to do today. In other words, the animals with which we evolved were not just bigger than today’s predators; they were also hungrier.
Navigating this world required astonishing skills. Our ancestors, in the boom-and-bust savannahs, had to travel great distances to find food, through a landscape shimmering with surprise and hazard. Their survival depended upon reacting to the barest signals: the flicker of a tail in the grass, the scent of honey, a change in humidity, tracks in the dust. We still possess these capacities. We carry with us a ghost psyche, adapted to a world we no longer inhabit, which contains – though it remains locked down for much of the time – a boundless capacity for fear and wonder, curiousity and enchantment. We are pre-tuned to the natural world; wired to respond to nature.
In computer games and fantasy novels, we still grapple the monsters of the mind. In the film of Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, the orcs rode on giant hyaenas(4). In the first Hunger Games film, bear dogs were released into the forest to prey on the contestants(5). I don’t believe these re-creations were accidental: the directors appear to have known enough of our evolutionary history to revive the ancestral terror these animals provoke. The heroic tales that have survived – tales of Ulysses, Sinbad, Sigurd, Beowulf, Cú Chulainn, St George, Arjuna, Lạc Long Quân and Glooskap – are those that resonate with the genetic memories lodged in our minds. I suspect that their essential form has remained unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years; that the encounters with monsters recorded in writing were a consolidation of stories we have been telling since we acquired the capacity to use the past tense.
You can see how such tales might have originated in a remarkable sequence in the BBC’s Human Planet series(6). Three men in southern Kenya, described by the programme as Dorobo people (though this is not a designation many ethnographers accept) stalk to within about 50 metres of a lion kill. Fifteen lions, blood dripping from their jaws, are eating the carcass of a wildebeest. The men suddenly stand and walk towards the pride. Rattled by their astonishing confidence, the lions flee. They watch from the bushes, puzzled and indecisive, as the three men walk up to the carcass, hack off one of the hind legs, then saunter away. That night, the adventurers roast the meat in their cave. “We really robbed those lions”, one of them boasts. “How many do you think there were?”, another asks. “Fifteen, but there might have been more.”
This, surely, is how sagas begin. Those men, led by a veteran of such ruses, are heroes of the old stamp. They outwitted a party of monsters, using guile and audacity, much as Ulysses did. A few hours later, they tell the first version of a story that might echo down the generations, every time with new flourishes and embellishments. Now imagine that, thousand of years hence, lions are long extinct, and the descendants of the Dorobo have only the haziest notion of what they were. They have become monsters even bigger and more dangerous than they were in life, and the feat becomes even more outrageous and unlikely. The saga remains true to its core, but the details have changed. We are those people, still telling the old stories, of encounters with the beasts that shaped us.
The world lives within us, we live within the world. By damaging the living planet we have diminished our existence.
We have been able to do this partly as a result of our ability to compartmentalise. This is another remarkable capacity we have developed, which perhaps reflects the demands of survival in the ever more complex human world we have created. By carving up the world in our minds we have learnt to shut ourselves out of it.
One of the tasks that parents set themselves is to train their children in linearity. Very young children don’t do linearity. Their inner life is discursive, contingent, impulsive. They don’t want to walk in a straight line down the pavement, but to wander off in the direction of whatever attracts their attention. They don’t begin a task with a view to its conclusion. They throw themselves into it, engage for as long as it’s exciting, then suddenly divert to something else.
This is how all animals except adult humans behave. Optimal foraging, the term biologists use to describe the way animals lock onto the best food supply, involves pursuing a task only for as long as it remains rewarding. Our own hunting and gathering would have followed a similar pattern, though it was complicated by our ability to plan and coordinate and to speculate about imagined outcomes. Broadly speaking, ours was a rambling and responsive existence, in which, by comparison to the way we live today, we had little capacity or inclination to impose our will on the world, to lay out a course of action and to follow it without deviation or distraction.
Only with the development of farming did we have to discipline ourselves to think linearly: following a plan from one point to another across weeks or months. Before long we were ploughing in straight lines, making hedges and ditches and tracks in straight lines, building houses and then towns in straight lines. Now almost every aspect of our lives is lived within grids, either concrete or abstract. Linearity, control and management dominate our lives. We fetishise progress: a continuous movement in the same direction. We impose our lines on the messy, contradictory and meandering realities of the human world, because otherwise we would be completely lost in it. We make compartments simple enough, amid the labyrinths we have created, to navigate and understand.
Thus we box ourselves out of the natural world. We become resistant to the experiences that nature has to offer; its spontaneity and serendipity, its unscripted delights, its capacity to shake us out of the frustrations and humiliations which are an inevitable product of the controlled and ordered world we have sought to create. We bully the living world into the grids we impose on ourselves. Even the areas we claim to have set aside for nature are often subjected to rigid management plans, in which the type and the height of the vegetation is precisely ordained and, through grazing or cutting or burning, nature is kept in a state of arrested development to favour an arbitrary assemblage of life over other possible outcomes. Nothing is allowed to change, to enter or leave. We preserve these places as if they were jars of pickles.
The language we use to describe them is also rigid and compartmentalised. In the UK we protect “sites of special scientific interest”, as if the wildlife they contain is of interest only to scientists. The few parts of the seabed which are not ripped up by industrial trawling are described as “reference areas”, as if their only value is as a baseline with which to compare destruction elsewhere. And is there a more alienating term than “reserve”? When we talk about reserve in people, we mean that they seem cold and remote. It reminds me of the old Native American joke: “we used to like the white man, but now we have our reservations.” Even “the environment” is an austere and technical term, which creates no pictures in the mind.
It’s not that we have banished our vestigial psychological equipment from our minds, or lost our instinct for engagement with wildlife. The tremendous popularity of nature programmes testifies to its persistence. I remember sitting in a café listening to a group of bus drivers talking, with great excitement and knowledge, about the spiders they had seen on television the night before, and thinking that, for all our technological sophistication, for all the clever means by which we shield ourselves from our emotions, we remain the people we have always been.
But we have suppressed these traits, and see the world through our fingers, shutting out anything that might spoil the view. We eat meat without even remembering that it has come from an animal, let alone picturing the conditions of its rearing and slaughter. We make no connection in our compartmentalised minds between the beef on our plates and the destruction of rainforests to grow the soya that fed the cattle; between the miles we drive and the oil wells drilled in rare and precious places, and the spills that then pollute them.
In our minds we have sanitised the world. WH Auden’s poem Et in Arcadia Ego describes how “Her jungle growths / Are abated, Her exorbitant monsters abashed, / Her soil mumbled,” while “the autobahn / Thwarts the landscape / In godless Roman arrogance”(7). But the old gods, the old fears, the old knowledge, have not departed. We simply choose not to see. “The farmer’s children / Tiptoe past the shed / Where the gelding knife is kept.”
Civilisation is boring. It has many virtues, but it leaves large parts of our minds unstimulated. It uses just a fraction of our mental and physical capacities. To know what comes next has been perhaps the dominant aim of materially-complex societies. Yet, having achieved it, or almost achieved it, we have been rewarded with a new collection of unmet needs. Many of us, I believe, need something that our planned and ordered lives don’t offer.
I found that something once in Cardigan Bay, on the west coast of Wales. I had stupidly launched my kayak into a ten-foot swell to fish a couple of miles from the shore. As I returned to land, I saw that the tide had risen, and ugly, jumbled breakers were smashing on the seawall. From where I sat, two hundred metres from the shore, I could see that the waves were stained brown by the shingle they flung up. I could hear them cracking and soughing against the wall. It was terrifying.
Behind me I heard a monstrous hiss: a freak wave was about to break over my head. I ducked and braced the paddle against the water. But nothing happened. Then a hooked grey fin, scarred and pitted, rose and skimmed just under the shaft of my paddle. I knew what it was, but the shock of it enhanced my rising fear. I glanced around, almost believing that I was under attack.
Then, from the stern, I heard a different sound: a crash and a rush of water. A gigantic bull dolphin soared into the air and almost over my head. As he flew past, he fixed his eye on mine. I stared at the sea into which he had disappeared, willing him to emerge again, filled with a wild exaltation, and a yearning of the kind that used to afflict me when I woke from that perennial pre-adolescent dream of floating down the stairs, my feet a few inches above the carpet. I realised at that moment that I had been suffering from a drought of sensation which I had come to accept as a condition of middle age, like the loss of the upper reaches of hearing.
I found that missing element again in the Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland. I was walking down a sandy path between oak and lime trees that rose for perhaps one hundred feet without branching. Around them the forest floor frothed with ramsons, celandines, spring peas and May lilies. I had seen boar with their piglets, red squirrels, hazel grouse, a huge bird that might have been an eagle owl, a black woodpecker. As I walked, every nerve seemed stretched, tuned like a string to the forest I was exploring. I rounded a curve in the path and found myself face to face with an animal that looked more like a Christian depiction of the Devil than any other creature I have seen.
I was close enough to see the mucus in her tear ducts. She had small, hooked black horns, heavy brows and eyes so dark that I could not distinguish the irises from the pupils. She wore a neat brown beard and an oddly human fringe between her horns. Her back rose to a crest then tapered away to a narrow rump, from which a black tail, slim as a whip, now twitched. She flared her nostrils and raised her chin. I fancied I could smell her sweet, beery breath. We watched each other for several minutes. I stayed so still that I could feel the blood pounding in my neck. Eventually the bison tossed her head, danced a couple of steps then turned, trotted back down the path then cantered away through the trees.
Experiences like these are the benchmarks of my life, moments in which dormant emotions were rekindled, in which my world was re-enchanted. But such unexpected encounters have been far too rare. Most of the lands in which I walk and the seas in which I swim or paddle my kayak are devoid of almost all large wildlife. I see deer, the occasional fox or badger, seals, but little else. It does not have to be like this. We can recharge the world with wonder, reverse much of the terrible harm we have done to it.
Over the past centuries, farming has expanded onto ever less suitable land. Even places of extremely low fertility have been cultivated or grazed, and the result has been a great disproportion between damage and productivity: the production of a tiny amount of food destroys the vegetation, the wild animals, the soil and the watersheds of entire mountain ranges. In the face of global trade, farming in such areas is becoming ever less viable: it cannot compete with production in fertile parts of the world. This has caused a loss of cultural diversity, which is another source of sadness.
But at the same time it means that the devastated land could be restored. In Europe, according to one forecast, 30 million hectares – an area the size of Poland – will be vacated by farmers by 2030(8). In the United States, two thirds of those parts of the land which were once forested, then cleared, have become forested again(9), as farming and logging have retreated, especially from the eastern half of the country. Rewilding, the mass restoration of ecosystems, which involves pulling down the redundant fences, blocking the drainage ditches, planting trees where necessary, re-establishing missing wildlife and then leaving the land to find its own way, could reverse much of the damage done to these areas. Already, animals like lynx, wolves, bears and moose, on both continents, are moving back into their former ranges.
There are also possibilities of restoring large parts of the sea. Public disgust at a fishing industry that has trashed almost every square metre of seabed on the continental shelves is now generating worldwide demands for marine parks. These are places in which commercial extraction is forbidden and the wildlife of the seas can recover. Even fishing companies can be persuaded to support them, when they discover that the fish migrating out of these places greatly boost their overall catches, a phenomenon known as the spillover effect. Such underwater parks are quickly recolonised by sessile life forms. Fish and crustacea proliferate, breeding freely and growing to great sizes once more. Dolphins, sharks and whales move in.
In these places we can leave our linearity and confinement behind, surrender to the unplanned and emergent world of nature, be surprised once more by joy, as surprise encounters with great beasts (almost all of which, despite our fears, are harmless to us) become possible again. We can rediscover those buried emotions that otherwise remain unexercised. Why should we not have such places on our doorsteps, to escape into when we feel the need?
Rewilding offers something else, even rarer than lynx and wolves and dolphins and whales. Hope. It offers the possibility that our silent spring could be followed by a raucous summer. In seeking to persuade people to honour and protect the living planet, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair. We could, perhaps, begin to heal some of the great wounds we have inflicted on the world and on ourselves.
George Monbiot is the author of Feral: rewilding the land, sea and human life. There’s an archive of his articles at http://www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Aldo Leopold, 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press.
2. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf
3. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/megafauna/valkenburgh.pdf
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3GFYKIwJ9Y
5. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/
7. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/jun/03/et-in-arcadia-ego/
8. http://www.rewildingeurope.com/assets/uploads/Downloads/Rewilding-Europe-Brochure-2012.pdf
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I’m sure that you will agree with me that this is a wonderful essay from Mr. Monbiot, an essay that speaks to us in ways that we all intuitively know makes huge sense.
There is hope for us!
The book! Part Five: Openness
I searched around for some meaning, some idea of what openness was really about. It’s such a quick word to run off the tongue, seemingly so easy to grab at the meaning of the word, that it isn’t until one pauses and asks oneself do I really, truly know what the word openness means, what it really conveys, that the doubt creeps in.
The dictionary didn’t help that much. Openness noun 1. The condition of being laid open to something undesirable or injurious. 2. Ready acceptance of often new suggestions, ideas, influences, or opinions.
No, that still didn’t offer a clear meaning of the sense of openness that I see in dogs, especially our dogs.
Then my eye wandered up the dictionary page to the entry immediately above openness; to open-mindedness: noun Ready acceptance of often new suggestions, ideas, influences, or opinions : openness, receptiveness, receptivity, responsiveness.
Bingo! Responsiveness, receptiveness! Those terms did speak to me. That’s how I saw the openness in our dogs.
Dogs don’t appear to engage in introspection, they don’t seem to worry about who they are. Their emotions are clear to us! One might say that dogs wear their emotions on their paws. They engage with the human world about them regardless of our human moods and more-or-less impartial to our situations or our choices. We call them and expect them to come. Perhaps, ask them to go to a part of the house if we are going out, or to stay in a place until we tell them they can move. Dogs appear simply to be there for us, as if only on our terms. As much as each day is unique and different, dogs offer a constancy, a reliability, that feels unmatched by us humans.
We depend on our dogs, as do the vast majority of people who have dogs in their lives. They calm us down in times of trouble; give us a better perspective of life’s ‘big picture’. We can so openly share a sense of joy with our dogs. Dogs give us permission to be silly with them, to hug them, to rub their tummies, to roll around on the floor with them. It is possible, easily so, to learn something from a dog every single day simply from observing sufficiently close these beautiful animals. Dogs ask only in return for food, water and affection.
The openness of dogs has been celebrated in many ways, in song and verse, for centuries. It is still to be celebrated today, for today that wonderful quality of openness is still vibrant in our dogs. It seems so much more than just the product of some evolution of nature. Reflect on the incredible range of species, on all that selective breeding, on the many differences in the environments in which dogs live out their lives. So many dogs and yet every one of them coming to us, to meet us, to be with us, just as they are, with no apologies and no covert agendas. As the author Susan Kennedy[1] once said, “Dogs are miracles with paws.”
I have had a dog in my life, my beloved Pharaoh, since 2003. I have had a great number of dogs in my life since meeting Jean in 2007. As many as sixteen and regrettably now down to nine at the time of writing[2] these words. I can’t imagine my life without our dogs. They truly provide unconditional love and they do so without hesitation. It is a simple yet immensely beautiful relationship. That love that we receive from our dogs comes from their openness. A dog’s openness is a gift. A precious, remarkable gift.
Now how on earth can one translate that across to the quality that we humans have to learn; to learn from our dogs? Are there any practical benefits for us in trying to practice the openness we see in dogs? By using the word ‘trying’ I’m admitting some degree of doubt about answering that question in the affirmative. Not doubting that there are benefits, just unclear about how to describe them. Unclear how we humans could ever match the openness of dogs.
So what I am going to do is to try flipping the issue on its head. Just stay with me a little longer.
I have referred to Jon Lavin many previous times in this book. In his world, his world of counselling and therapy, Jon speaks like this. Namely, that in the world of solutions focussed therapy, the area that Jon practices in professionally, the way forward with the person who has come to see Jon is always to focus “on what is working“. Jon explains that while one would initially allow the problems to be voiced, this negativity would always be a tiny piece of the overall process, say less than 5% of the session. That even if a client’s whole world seemed to be failing, there would always be something that was alright, always a 1% that was working, and that would be the place to start.
No better endorsed by the website of the organisation Good Therapy[3]. I quote [my emphasis]:
Solution focused brief therapy (SFBT[4]) targets the desired outcome of therapy as a solution rather than focusing on the symptoms or issues that brought someone to therapy. This technique only gives attention to the present and the future desires of the client, rather than focusing on the past experiences. The therapist encourages the client to imagine their future as they want it to be and then the therapist and client collaborate on a series of steps to achieve that goal.
Returning to the example of openness that we see in our dogs, maybe rather than wringing our hands because we will never be as open as those wonderful dogs around us, perhaps we should flip the idea on its head. Ergo, not strive to be the same as our dogs, just to follow their lead.
In other words, just be more mindful of the need for openness, to practice openness as a conscious idea, and to develop the habits of openness. Holding our dogs up as a marvellous pillar, as a wonderful example, of the goal of greater openness that we all seek.
1,039 words Copyright © 2014 Paul Handover
[1] I am indebted to Susan Kennedy’s writings for inspiring many of the ideas in this chapter.
[2] November, 2014
[3] http://www.goodtherapy.org
[4] Solution focused therapy was developed by Steve De Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, and their team at the Brief Family Therapy Family Center in Milwaukee, USA.
The book! Part Five: Forgiveness.
Dogs offer a multitude of examples of forgiveness that many of us probably don’t see. Well, do not see that quality of forgiveness of dogs in such a clear, specific way. Yet think of dogs that are treated cruelly, often over months or years, and then find a new, loving home. Think of dogs that have spent weeks and months in confinement at the local humane centre. Or more terrible to comprehend are those dogs that have simply been abandoned; just thrown away by a so-called human.
We take it totally for granted, when dogs find that new loving home, that they will adjust quickly and easily. For example, one of the dogs that we have here at home is Casey. He was found in the local dog rescue unit down in Payson, Arizona, when we were living in that part of America. Casey had been confined in the dog rescue unit for coming up to a year, and probably hadn’t found a new home because he was a Pit Bull mix, and looked it. Two weeks before he was due to be ‘put down’, classified as being unadoptable, Jean brought him home.
The speed at which he settled in to his new home including, not too much later, a house move from Payson to Southern Oregon, was just wonderful. Casey never for a moment displayed any cautiousness or nervousness towards Jean and me, or, even more importantly, didn’t reveal any anti-social inclinations towards visitors who came to the house. Casey has a wonderful temperament and is a happy, lively, affectionate dog. Clearly, Casey harbours no grudges from past experiences. His forgiveness of the way his life had been dominated by the actions of humans is flawless.
With Payson in mind, there’s another example of how a dog so quickly puts past experiences behind them and embraces their new life.
For in Payson we knew the author, Trish Iles, who has the blog Contemplating Happiness[1]. Here is a lovely story from Trish, in her own words:
What the dog knew!
I was pondering the eternal question: why does two weeks of relaxing vacation seem like so much more time than two weeks of working like my pants are on fire, here at my desk? My sweet husband and I talked about it a little bit, but came to no definitive answer. I chatted with friends about it. No insights. Google had no opinion, either.
Chloe came to us from a rescue organization. I think sometimes about what her experiences have been in her young life. She started out as an abandoned puppy on a reservation in New Mexico and was soon in the pound where she was on the euthanasia list. A kind woman rescued her and took care of her until she found us: just when Chloe was becoming at home with the rescue lady, she was uprooted again and sent home with two new people. What must she have been thinking?
Chloe didn’t close her heart to us, though. She watched for a few days. When she decided we weren’t going to make dinner out of her and that she was really staying with us, she threw her whole being into becoming one of the family. She let herself trust us.
I’m not sure I would have had the courage to trust a new set of people again. I’m doubly not sure that I give a rat’s patootie what those new people thought of or wanted from me. Chloe was willing not only to trust us, but to love us. She forgave us immediately for ripping her from the home she knew, and she adopted us right back.
Chloe was born knowing. She knows about joy. She knows about living a life in balance. She knows about forgiveness, trust, exuberance, a passion for learning and the power of a good nap. I think that when I grow up, I want to be just like her.
Chloe knows about forgiveness.
Moving on. Much too late to make me realise the inadequacies of my own parenting skills, I learnt an important lesson when training Pharaoh, a German Shepherd, who came into my life as a puppy back in 2003; the first dog I had ever had. What I learnt was that putting more emphasis into praise and reward for getting it right ‘trains’ the dog much more quickly than telling it off. The classic example being scolding a dog for running off when instead there should be lots of hugs and praise for the dog returning home. The scolding simply teaches the dog that returning home isn’t pleasant whereas praise reinforces the belief in the dog that home is the place to be. Summed up by a phrase that I read somewhere: “Catch them in the act of doing right!”
Like so many things in life, so very obvious once understood! There is no doubt in my mind that this approach, this philosophy, works with youngsters in just the same positive way.
Let’s focus now on the nature of forgiveness in people; in us humans.
There are, essentially, two options that we can choose to act out when we are hurt by someone. We can hang on to those feelings of anger and resentment, and possibly have thoughts of revenge, or respond with forgiveness. The first leads to wounds of anger, bitterness and resentment. The second leads to healing, to the rewards of peace, hope, gratitude and joy.
H’mm – deciding upon the best option could be tough decision! Apologies, I couldn’t avoid that flippancy!
The powerfully positive outcome from acting with forgiveness is that the act that caused the hurt loses, or is denied, any real emotional force upon one. You quickly put it behind you and focus on other, more positive parts of your life. That’s not to say that a significant act of hurt is forgotten, possibly not so for some time, it’s just that it lessens its grip on us, often significantly so. Indeed, quite often, forgiveness can give birth to feelings of understanding, empathy and compassion for the one who hurt us.
Moreover, forgiveness doesn’t mean that you are blind to, or deny, the other person’s responsibility for causing you to be hurt, nor does it minimise, let alone justify, the wrongness of the act. The person can be forgiven, without excusing the act. Forgiveness brings a kind of peace that helps you and I get on with our lives.
Actually, the benefits of forgiveness are even more tangible than the subjective meaning of peace.
There is real evidence to show that the letting go of grudges and bitterness, of offering forgiveness can lead to:
◦ Healthier relationships
◦ Greater spiritual and psychological well-being
◦ Less anxiety, stress and hostility
◦ Lower blood pressure
◦ Fewer symptoms of depression
◦ Stronger immune system
◦ Improved heart health
◦ Higher self-esteem
Beats a few bottles of pills in spades!
Now, as I read back over those last few sentences it struck me as having the slight tone of a Sunday sermon. That what needs to be added to those stirring ideas is how does one learn to forgive, learn to forgive in a practical manner.
Psychotherapists, and others from similar backgrounds, say that forgiveness is the result of change; or more accurately put, a commitment to a process of change.
To put some flesh on the bones of that last idea, that forgiveness is the commitment to a process of change, what now follows are five recommendations. Resist the temptation to read on without pause, indeed just say to yourself that after you have read each of the five recommendations coming up, you will reflect for sufficient time for your head to embrace the meaning of each recommendation, and still remaining paused, give your heart time to engage with your head. I hope that’s clear.
Bring up in your mind an episode where someone else caused you hurt. It can be a recent episode or one from long ago that still has the potential to hurt you. Dwell on it for a while.
So to the first recommendation: Consider the values of forgiveness to you, not at a theoretical level, but to you in terms of where you are at this point in your life, and by implication, how important those values of forgiveness are to you at this given time.
Stop! Look away from the page! Reflect on what that means. Think it with your head, feel it with your heart.
So to number two: Reflect on the situation, the real facts of what happened, how it came about, how you reacted, and to what degree the situation has affected your life, health and well-being; or has the potential to so do.
Stop! Look away from the page! Reflect on what that means. Think it with your head, feel it with your heart.
Here is the third recommendation: Actively choose to forgive the person who hurt you. Possibly by re-reading this chapter down to this point. Actively chose to forgive that person now!
Stop! Look away from the page! Reflect on what that means. Think it with your head, feel it with your heart.
Number four, the penultimate recommendation: Stop seeing yourself as a victim of the hurtful event. Understand that by continuing to feel victimised, you are unable to release the control and power that the offending person, and/or the situation, has over you.
Stop! Look away from the page! Reflect on what that means. Think it with your head, feel it with your heart.
The final recommendation; number five: As you let go of the pain, of the hurt, of your grudges, your life is now no longer defined by how you have been hurt. Better than that, the letting go opens your heart to finding compassion and understanding for the other person.
Think it with your head, feel it with your heart.
There is no question that forgiveness can be challenging at times, especially if the person who’s hurt you doesn’t admit wrong or doesn’t ever speak of his or her sorrow. But never allow yourself to become stuck. Reflect on the times when you have hurt others and when those others have forgiven you. Share your burden of finding forgiveness, such as writing in a journal, or through pray or guided meditation; even better open up to someone you’ve found to be wise and compassionate, such as a spiritual leader, a mental health provider, or an impartial loved one or friend. Nearly forgot: share your burden with your dog! They are such great listeners!
Never forget that finding forgiveness is a process and even small hurts may need to be forgiven over and over again.
In the vast majority of cases, forgiveness can lead to reconciliation. Especially so when the hurtful event involved someone whose relationship you really value; for example someone emotionally close to you. However, there is one case where reconciliation is impossible. That is the case where the person who hurt you has died. However, even if reconciliation isn’t possible, forgiveness always is.
A quick afterthought tells me that there is a second case where reconciliation is impossible: when the person who hurt you refuses to communicate with you. As they say, it takes two to tango, and you always have the choice to walk away, to move on, to reflect that someone who hurts you and then stands in the way of reconciliation may possibly be better off disconnected from you; temporarily or permanently.
Never forget to respect yourself, to keep an open heart and mind and do what seems best for you in the specific situation.
The final thought for this chapter on forgiveness is not to think that it is about the other person needing to change; that isn’t the point of forgiveness. Forgiveness is about us, how it can change our lives through bringing peace, happiness, and emotional and spiritual healing. It also helps, enormously so, in allowing us to recognise our own faults, our own mistakes, and the times when we have hurt others, so that we can offer our apologies in an open and honest manner.
Forgiveness is one of the many precious qualities that we can learn from dogs.
2,036 words Copyright © 2014 Paul Handover
[1] http://contemplatinghappiness.blogspot.com/p/my-books.html
Picture parade seventy-four
The second set of wonderful pictures from Tricia.
(If you missed last week’s set they are here.)
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What incredible, wonderful, loving animals they are!
Happiness is a state of BEING..
A wonderful post from Sue Dreamwalker.
A couple of weeks ago, back on the 26th November, Sue published a post over on her blog, Dreamwalker’s Sanctuary, that ‘spoke’ to me in ways beyond words. For when we turn inside of ourselves, when we try to listen to our own deepest experiences, the word ‘soul’ might not be out of place here, we frequently struggle to translate those feelings, those inner voices, into words. Words seem far too crude! It’s how a beautiful vision of nature can never be perfectly transferred into a photographic image.
So I won’t blather on! Just let your eyes feast on the following:
ooOOoo
Resurrecting a state of BEing.
I am the Sky
I am the Sea
I am in all you see
I am the Wind
Within your breath
I am with you even in Death
I am the space between your thoughts
And nothing of me should scare you naught
I am in everything you do
And all I do is Love You.
I AM
ME..
I wrote that poem sometime ago now.. and I often find myself still searching for that BEing within.. Below is what I posted about BEing in 2011…
What is this “Being” inside of me? inside of ALL of us.. What is it that drives us, makes us tick.. I often talk to that ‘Being’ don’t you? as I search inside and question and listen for the answers.
We call ourselves Human BE-ings.. but what does that mean? Many I think have forgotten that “Being” within themselves as we search externally to
BE that something else.. We get bombarded with being told who we should aspire to ‘Be’ like, who to follow, how to pray, etc etc.. we are told what we should wear, what to eat, what products to buy.. and our BE-ing has got lost, swamped by all the exterior material diversions of being told how to live our lives….
We get disillusioned and search outside of ourselves for the Guru or saviour to come and make our lives more meaningful as we endeavour to find that missing part that makes us whole.. .. We are never satisfied with our lot, some even change their own appearances as they strive to BE this image of a person that to them is not the one who looks back at them through the mirror.
Do we really Look into that Mirror and Do we really SEE?
We are divided in schools, Higher education , Top/Bottom of the class,Class distinction, Grades- Culture and Creeds.. We judge each other,we condemn those who have differing views… We look down on those who appear of lesser means — We Label people and we put limits upon ourselves telling ourselves we are not worthy, for society has made us think in terms of possessions and wealth as status symbols..
We become jealous of those whose lives seemed enriched and full, but as we look closer are they enriched? Are they content with that ‘Being’ within? It seems not, for many too are still searching outside of themselves to find that which makes them Happy.. and all that money and wealth shows that Happiness still cannot be bought…
We think ourselves as separate beings, alone, and yet we are all of us part of the Human Race… We are ALL of us HUMAN BEINGS… Something I think many forget as we race to gather yet more and more material ‘Things’ around our selves thinking they will BE the Key to happiness…
Happiness is a state of BEING..
Happiness is not found in any-‘Thing’ other than Within Ourselves…
When we look at the I AM when we really Seek that Inner BEING when we truly Love ourselves the inner core-self.. when we come to LOVE ourselves and stop trying to BE something that we are seeking to BE… only then will we find our True BEING..
We are all connected within that Family of Light
We are ALL BEINGS OF LIGHT ENERGY within this Human Form.
ALL OF US ARE LIGHT BEINGS COME TO EXPERIENCE
..all of us seeking the same thing and all of us forgetting how to connect to that most basic thing..
ONE’s SELF
TO BE- One’s SELF!
We need look no further to make ourselves feel whole and complete, than to
Look WITHIN our BEING.
For instead of seeking to ‘BE’ this or that, Instead of trying to ‘BE’ Wealthy, Wise, … ,searching to ‘BE’ what ever else you think you need to make you Happy
ALL we have to BE is —LOVE
And to ‘BE’- Happy..
‘BE’ Wise,…
To ‘BE’ ALL of these things.
Remember that there is nothing you need do except
‘BE’ in the ‘Moment’ of ‘NOW!’..
and ‘BE’ the Best you know how to BE.. Right now!..
And start BEING who YOU choose to BE..
Love and Blessings
Dreamwalker
And one more thought to add to BE-responsible for your thoughts and Actions.. And BE -aware that your thoughts contribute to the creation of either positive or negative outcomes in the world..
So BE-prepared for the outcomes..
Blessings
Sue
ooOOoo
Do yourself a favour; a big favour – go and read it all through again!
Sue, many, many thanks for letting me republish this!
The book! Part Five: Sharing
Dogs share so much of themselves in such an easy fashion. Here’s a story that made me laugh.
A man in a casino walks past three men and a dog playing poker.
“Wow!” he says, “That’s a very clever dog!“
“He’s not that clever,” replies one of the other players.
“Every time he gets a good hand he wags his tail!“
This very clever dog playing poker couldn’t hide his happiness and had to wag his tail!
One of the remarkable things that is noticed by those that have a number of dogs in their lives is the very natural way that they share so much. In our own case, we live with nine dogs, seven of whom are ex-rescue dogs. It would be fair to imagine that any dog that had come either straight off the street, a feral dog in other words, or from a dog rescue centre, would have some behavioural issues. To a small extent, this has been noticed by us; that some dogs come to us with a few minor, anti-social issues.
But the way that existing dogs in the home quickly assess and welcome a new dog, how they instinctively know that they are going to fit in, is a model of openness and acceptance. But more on that in the forthcoming chapters on those topics of openness and acceptance. Here, I want to stick specifically to sharing.
Sharing is synonymous with selflessness. One couldn’t openly share much of our life if it wasn’t easy to push to the back of one’s mind, one’s consciousness, our need for self. In more easy terms, our egos. For if our egos are dominant then selfless sharing would be very difficult; some might say impossible.
A dog seems to know with certainty that its best interest lays down the pathway of getting on with other dogs in the family. Inevitably, the boundaries of sharing, from the perspective of the dog, indeed from a philosophical angle of this quality in the dog, are intermingled with all the other qualities previously written about, and many of the qualities coming up in the next few chapters. So we observe how dogs will lick each other, snuggle up and sleep together, play together and share; all the attributes of a trustful, loving community.
That natural sharing sense of a dog links effortlessly with our human need for sharing. I had to look up and remind myself who it was that coined the expression: “No man is an island.” It was the English poet John Dunne[1], by the way. A beautiful, masterful reflection on our human need for sharing.
There are numerous benefits for having a dog, or two, in one’s life but possibly the core benefit is the one of never feeling alone. Think how often one sees a homeless person by the side of the road begging for food, money or for a lift somewhere else, and nearby is their dog. Irrespective of the fact, the certainty, that being homeless is tough, is the added certainty that it is a great deal tougher if there is a dog to feed and look after. My strong sense is that the sharing of the lives of two creatures, man and dog, more than offsets the added challenges of having a dog in your life if you have no permanent home.
No better underlined than by an article seen on the online presence of Flagpole Magazine[2], the “locally owned, independent voice of Athens, Northeast Georgia.”
The article[3] was called: Dogs and Their Homeless Owners Share Love, if not Shelter, and was written by Stephanie Talmadge. It opened:
If you walk down Clayton Street, specifically near the College Avenue intersection, you may have received a furry greeting from a little brown, scraggly pup. Usually a blur, due to near-constant wagging, this tiny dog, Malika, spends many of her days guarding that corner for her owners, David and Dorothy Gardener, who are experiencing temporary homelessness.
Though the Gardeners are homeless, little Malika is far from it. She’s not in the pound, waiting to be adopted or rescued before her time runs out. She’s not running around in the streets or woods, fending for herself.
Stephanie Talmadge then makes an important point towards the end of her piece:
Homeless or not, owning a pet is a huge responsibility, and obviously it can be extremely rewarding, well worth the complications it creates. Plus, a person doesn’t have to be homeless to have financial barriers to providing good care. Plenty of dogs who live in permanent housing are neglected and mistreated daily.
“Just because someone’s homeless shouldn’t mean they’re not allowed to have a companion animal,” Athens-Clarke County Animal Control Superintendent Patrick Rives says, “And there may be some good reasons for them to [have one]… There is a psychological impact of having a companion animal, and I wouldn’t want to take that away from someone.”
Around 1870, Senator George C. Vest delivered a powerful and moving eulogy for the dog; delivered to the jury at the Old Courthouse in Warrensburg. It was in response to his dog, Old Drum, being shot the previous year. Here are his words:
The best friend man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son, or daughter, that he has reared with loving care, may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and good name may become traitors to their faith. The money a man has he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our head.
The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. A man’s dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground when the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only to be near his master’s side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer, he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince.
When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wing, and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.
If fortune drives his master forth, an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies. And when that last scene of all comes, and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there, by the graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true, even in death.
Now when it comes to us humans learning the quality of sharing from our dogs, there is no shortage of examples of humans engaged in wonderful acts of sharing. In undertaking research, I came across an article in the Houston Chronicle[4] headed: What makes us human? Teaching, learning and sharing.
“We wanted to understand how all of these behaviors came about specifically for humans,” said Steven Schapiro, an M.D. Anderson professor at the Bastrop facility. “And we wanted to understand why our closest living relatives can’t do all of the kinds of things we do.”
Professor Schapiro went on to explain: “To address their question the scientists devised a series of puzzles with escalating difficulty, the solving of which would produce rewards – stickers of increasing attractiveness for kids; carrots, apples and then grapes for the monkeys.”
Then observing:
During the experiment the researchers observed that the children treated the puzzles as a social exercise, working them together and giving verbal instruction to one another. When successful, they shared the rewards.
In contrast the chimpanzees and capuchins appeared to only see the puzzles as a means to obtain rewards, and worked mostly independently and did not learn from their efforts. They never shared.
Humans, then, have ratcheted up their culture by teaching one another, imitating the successful behaviours of others and altruism.
“When successful, they shared the rewards.”
Who knows if us humans uniquely having dogs in our lives over thousands of years, way back to the times when we depended on our survival through hunting and gathering, if learning to share the hunting and the gathering with our dogs, embedded within us the sharing of rewards? I would like to think so.
I want to end this chapter by promoting two wonderful modern examples of a culture of sharing. Firstly, I’m referring to the Buy Nothing Project[5] that has as it’s subheading: Random Acts of Kindness All Day Long.
As the ‘About’ page[6] explains:
Buy Nothing. Give Freely. Share Creatively.
The Buy Nothing Project began as an experimental hyper-local gift economy on Bainbridge Island, WA; in just 8 months, it has become a social movement, growing to over 25,000 members in 150 groups, in 4 countries. Our local groups form gift economies that are complementary and parallel to local cash economies; whether people join because they’d like to quickly get rid of things that are cluttering their lives, or simply to save money by getting things for free, they quickly discover that our groups are not just another free recycling platform. A gift economy’s real wealth is the people involved and the web of connections that forms to support them. Time and again, members of our groups find themselves spending more and more time interacting in our groups, finding new ways to give back to the community that has brought humor, entertainment, and yes, free stuff into their lives. The Buy Nothing Project is about setting the scarcity model of our cash economy aside in favor of creatively and collaboratively sharing the abundance around us.
“It has become a social movement …. collaboratively sharing the abundance around us.”
Secondly, to a completely different example, that of software. Let me explain or, better, let me quote from the home-page of the website Open Source Initiative[7]: “Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone.” [My emphasis]
Here’s the opening paragraph of an article[8] in Forbes Magazine; written by George Bradt.
Why Open Leadership Has Become Essential
You would not be reading this if open source software did not exist. Without open source standards, the Internet would not exist. This article would not exist. Those of you whose parents met on Match.com would not exist. All of you should be thankful for open source software. Now, as the world has changed, open source software’s principles of openness, transparency and meritocracy have become essential standards for leadership in general.
“… principles of openness, transparency and meritocracy have become essential standards for leadership in general.” Not just for leadership but for all of mankind! Sharing seems like the way to go!
If I was a dog, it would be impossible to stop my tail wagging!
1,930 words Copyright © 2014 Paul Handover
[1] It was a famous line from “Meditation XVII,”
[2] http://www.flagpole.com/about-us
[3] http://www.flagpole.com/news/news-features/2014/10/08/dogs-and-their-homeless-owners-share-love-if-not-shelter
[4] http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/What-makes-us-human-Teaching-learning-and-3375389.php
[5] http://buynothingproject.org
[6] http://buynothingproject.org/about/
[7] http://opensource.org
[8] http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2014/11/25/why-open-leadership-has-become-essential/
Towards a new world.
A republication of a fascinating essay.
When I posted yesterday about a ‘growing’ awareness, I had no idea that earlier this morning, Oregon time, I would read an essay over on Rob Hopkin’s Transition Network blog that just had to be shared with you. But such is the wonder of our wired-up world. The essay is called From dismal science to language of beauty – Towards a new story of economics and is authored by Inex Aponte and is republished in full. (The emboldening is mine.)
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Inez Aponte: From dismal science to language of beauty – Towards a new story of economics
Humans are storytelling beings. In fact one could argue that it is impossible to make sense of the world without story. Storytelling is how we piece together 
facts, beliefs, feelings and history to form something of a coherent whole connecting us to our individual and collective past, present and future. The stories that help make meaning of our lives inform how we shape and re-shape our environment. This re-created world, through its felt presence in structures and systems as well as its cultural expressions, in turn tells us its story.
We live in a time of powerful globalised narratives. We no longer (or rarely) sit and listen to tales that were born of places we know intimately and told by people deeply connected to these places. Ours is a world saturated with information from every corner of the planet, voiced by ‘storytellers’ on television, radio, the internet, mobile phones, newspapers, billboards, books and magazines. It would appear that we now have access to a multitude of perspectives and, with that, more understanding of the different options open to human beings to live fulfilling lives. In reality however, the majority of us have to conform to a narrow set of rules not of our own making: the rules of economics.
The way in which our lives have become dominated by the pursuit of financial gain is full of contradictions. We may not be driven by the ‘love of money’ but we still have to ‘make a living’. The fluctuations in the economy have a profound effect on our everyday lives, but very few of us understand how it works, let alone feel we have the power to influence it. This lack of agency fills most of us with a degree of ‘background anxiety’ that drives many of our decisions, consciously or unconsciously. The economic story is possibly the most powerful story being told at this very moment.
So how is this story being told (and sold) to us? How is it being framed?
1- The work/life balance
This term has become so ubiquitous that it is often used in its English form even in non-English speaking countries. It seems to be a concept that needs no translation; it can easily be swallowed whole. But hidden inside this seemingly innocuous phrase are some powerful assumptions.
On one side of the scales we place work, not just any work, but paid labour. On the other side we place life. By life we don’t mean the actual fact of being alive, but our aliveness, our joy, our pleasures. Placing work and life on opposite sides of the balance we are tacitly agreeing that paid work is worth sacrificing our aliveness for, that it is ok to be a little bit ‘dead’ in your job. If you are lucky enough to have a job you love the concept may seem irrelevant, but for people whose work is tedious, soul-destroying or even dangerous this is the perfect frame to diffuse any discontent: ‘We agree that having a degree of aliveness is important, but you cannot have all of it. You have to sacrifice some of your aliveness just to stay alive.’ The framing of paid work as a necessity for ‘earning’ one’s existence remains unquestioned.
2- The economy must grow
Having determined the necessity of jobs it’s no surprise to hear world leaders repeating the growth mantra over and over. The story goes like this: we need growth so we can create jobs so we can pay people money to buy stuff that creates more jobs. Nobody questions whether the jobs that are created are worth giving up their aliveness for or even whether what is being produced or provided adds any further joy or satisfaction to society. The frame of ‘employment for all’ is so sacred that anyone pointing out how many of the businesses providing these jobs destroy the planet we depend upon for our survival is presented with another false dichotomy: people against nature.
When George Bush sr, at the time of the Kyoto protocol, told Americans “I am the one that is burdened with finding the balance between sound environmental practice on the one hand and jobs for American families on the other.” he was setting up a frame that continues to be echoed by world leaders today. Even if in our heart of hearts we know we need the earth more than we need the artificial constructs of jobs and money, by now we have become so dependent on money to stay alive that this kind of language stifles our capacity to imagine a different solution. Fearing for the survival and safety of our loved ones we accept the war declared on nature in our name.
3- Humans are selfish
This experience of fearing for our survival dovetails neatly with our third and perhaps most powerful economic frame: the rational, utility maximising individual – Homo Economicus. This story tells us that given the choice humans will seek to get the most for themselves with the least amount of effort. It’s simply a ‘dog eat dog’ world.
Funnily enough it looks like the people who most fit the stereotype of the selfish utility maximiser are economists themselves. Various studies have repeatedly shown that non-economists are not as selfish or rational as economic theory would have us believe and that economists, or students of economics, consistently score higher on selfishness than ‘ordinary’ people. Despite these insights, the story that humans are by nature selfish and competitive persists.
But are any of these frames telling us the truth about ourselves and the world? Do we have to accept work as a necessary burden? Do we have no choice but to destroy the planet in order to survive? Are we really as selfish as economic textbooks suggest?
Perhaps the first thing we need to ask is: Is any of this about true economics in the first place?
To answer this question we need to travel back to ancient Greece where Aristotle was musing on two distinct practices: Oikonomia and Khrematistika. Oikonomia is where we get the word economics from and is described as ‘the management of the household so as to increase its use value to all members over the long term’. Khrematistika on the other hand (from khrema, meaning money) refers to ‘the branch of political economy relating to the manipulation of property and wealth so as to maximize short-term monetary exchange value to the owner’.
In their book ‘For the Common Good’ economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb, Jr distinguish between the two as follows:
“Oikonomia differs from chrematistics in three ways. First, it takes the long-run rather than the short-run view. Second, it considers costs and benefits to the whole community, not just to the parties to the transaction. Third, it focuses on concrete use value and the limited accumulation thereof, rather than on an abstract exchange value and its impetus towards unlimited accumulation…. For oikonomia, there is such a thing as enough. For chrematistics, more is always better… “
By now you might recognise our current economic system in this description of chrematistics. No wonder we are confused. We believe we are practising economics when we are in fact practising chrematistics. This has far reaching consequences for both the practice of economics and its perception. By allowing chrematistics to masquerade as economics the owning classes have perpetuated the illusion that increasing their financial wealth will be good for all of us and we, in our own misunderstanding of the proper function of an economy, have accepted chrematistics as the dominant form of resource management.
But what if there was another way of thinking and speaking about the economy, one that was in line with the true meaning of the word: the ability to manage the home for all, the art of living? What if we were able to redeem the language of economics so that it might liberate our imaginations and creativity and tell a beautiful story that expresses what we truly value?
Human Scale Development
In the 1970s, after many years of researching poverty in Latin America, Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef came to the conclusion that conventional economics, in practising chrematistics, did not have the tools to adequately address the experience of poverty and could not serve to alleviate it. What was needed was a language that allowed poverty and wealth to be understood in much broader terms. Together with his colleagues he developed what is now commonly known as Human Scale Development (HSD) or ‘barefoot economics’.
HSD proposes that there are nine fundamental human needs which are universal across time and place (as opposed to wants which are subject to cultural and historical trends). These fundamental needs are: Subsistence, Protection, Identity, Understanding, Participation, Creation, Freedom, Affection and Idleness.
Needs are not the same as the strategies or satisfiers we use to meet those needs. Needs are finite; satisfiers are culturally determined and infinite. In HSD each satisfier is valuated according to its impact on the rest of our own needs, the needs of others and, most importantly, on the conditions for life itself: a living thriving planet.
In this model of economics, you are wealthy when your needs are satisfied and if one or more of your needs are not met you are poor. Whereas our current model has conventionally defined wealth as how much money you possess and poverty as a lack of money – expressed as a poverty of subsistence – in HSD you may suffer from any number of poverties if one or more of your needs are not adequately satisfied. So you may have a full belly and suffer from poverties of affection, understanding or identity. Or you may feel safe and protected by having a secure well-paid job, but work so much you suffer from poverties of creation, participation and idleness. When enough members of a community suffer a particular poverty for prolonged periods it develops into a pathology. It becomes a sickness that is often hard to recognise because it has been normalised. We may ask whether our tendencies towards addictive behaviours, whether they be addictions to work, alcohol, gaming or sex, are expressions of such pathologies.
In HSD the key to living well, and therefore the purpose of a true economy, is to adequately satisfy our fundamental human needs within the Earth’s natural limits. Our role within such an economy is not only to seek to get our needs met, but to use our gifts to meet the needs of others.
This is good news, because here the time you spend playing with your child and meeting their need for creation, affection and participation creates a positive balance in the economy. As does the meal you made for your elderly neighbour, (meeting the needs of subsistence, affection, understanding, and protection) as does joining a community garden, learning a new skill, lying in the grass watching the clouds go by. Framing economics in this manner tells us that we are economic participants regardless of whether we are making financial gains. Other skills, gifts or abilities become our ‘currency’. In fact most things that the conventional (chrematistic) economy ignores create wealth in a Human Scale Economy.
The reverse is also true. Actions that are now considered beneficial for the chrematistic economy – for example, cutting down forests to build roads – soon appear uneconomical through an HSD lens. The destruction of the natural world also destroys opportunities to meet many of our fundamental needs: for idleness (going for walks in nature) identity (these places hold meaning that stretches back over centuries) participation and creation (it is where the community gathers, connects, plays) and understanding (the opportunity to connect with and learn from the more-than-human world).
Economies are created by the people
Economies, large or small, local or global, are created by the people. They depend on our collective efforts, labour and entrepreneurship as well as our songs, our dances, our poetry, our joy, our curiosity, our dreams. The macro economy must be reformed from the inside out, it must start with an understanding of who we are, what is dear to our hearts and from that place radiate our values outwards in order to truly meet our needs. A ‘barefoot’ economy is an economy where people – liberated from wage slavery, and with access to the means by which they can satisfy their fundamental needs – are able to choose adequate satisfiers suitable to their region and culture. It is one where we acknowledge and respect our dependence on a thriving earth. It is a place where we have once again understood the meaning of ‘enough’.
“If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors’ prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, (…) then we would begin to turn to our communities – and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared.”
“The Earth is what we all have in common.” (Wendell Berry)
I look forward to a time when students of economics are required to study the work of artists, poets and makers. When economic text books, as well as addressing how we manage the earth to provide food, homes, clothing and jobs, also speak of the need for beauty, intimacy, community and love.
The Art of Economics (and may it one day become an art) needs a new story and a new language that doesn’t require us to choose between self and others, work and aliveness, our own lives and the lives of fellow humans or the health of the planet. A language that has the potential to re-frame the story, re-educate our thinking and get us back on the side of community, on the side of the earth and on the side of life.
Inez Aponte is a facilitator, storyteller and activist, and co-founder of the Well & Good Project. You can contact her about talks and workshops on HSD and the Fundamental Human Needs framework at inez_aponte@hotmail.com.
www.somesmallholding.wordpress.com
www.wellandgoodproject.wordpress.com
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This article was written based on a talk given in Bonn within a series of REconomy-Events organised by the Bonn Transition-Town Initiative “Bonn-im-Wandel” and supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and was originally published on the website of the recent Degrowth conference in Leipzig.
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Don’t know about you but I found this both fascinating and very informative.
A ‘growing’ awareness.
The pun is deliberate!
Just at the moment there seems to be an incredible explosion of awareness about the need to change. Won’t say anymore other than from the day of the Winter Solstice, less that two weeks away, I will be publishing a number of posts about this new awareness and the implications, the positive implications, for the coming years.
To set the tone, I am republishing an article that appeared on the website of the organisation Nature Needs Half. I am grateful for their permission to so do.
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Nature Needs Half in the Earth Island Journal
Originally published in the Earth Island Journal by William H. Funk
Conservation group promoting an ambitious new proposal for wilderness protection
During the last half century conservationists around the world have won some impressive victories to protect wild places. Here in the US, the Wilderness Act preserves some 110 million acres of public land. Private holdings by groups like The Nature Conservancy safeguard tens of millions of additional acres. The idea of protecting ecosystems from industrial development has spread around the world. There’s the Mavuradonha Wilderness in Zimbabwe, the El Carmen ecosystem in northern Mexico, Kissama National Park in Angola, and the Tasmanian Wilderness in Australia, to name just a few stunning parks and preserves; UNESCO’s world heritage list includes 197 sites of special beauty and/or biodiversity.
But conservation biologists now recognize that these sanctuaries are limited in what they can accomplish precisely because they are special — which is to say, rare. Parks and preserves are all too often islands of biological integrity in a sea of human development. To really protect natural systems, healthy biomes need to be the rule, not the exception.
To achieve that vision, The WILD Foundation, a multinational NGO based in Boulder, Colorado, is pushing a bold concept called “Nature Needs Half.” In a world in which even the wealthiest governments routinely abdicate their responsibilities toward future generations and the environment, Nature Needs Half has set out an unbelievable challenge: to formally, legally set aside one half of Earth’s land and water as interconnected natural areas.
This is, of course, a hugely ambitious endeavor, opposing as it does the assumption that Earth’s resources are here to be exploited solely by humans. We live in what some have called the “Anthropocene,” the Age of Man, a world in which every aspect of physical being, from the oceanic depths to the troposphere, has been radically altered by humankind. Rivers are being dammed, forests leveled, oceans emptied and wildlife eradicated. It’s not a pretty picture, but as an empiric truth it’s difficult to refute. Consider a few facts:
The long-term acidification of the oceans by our ongoing buildup of industrial carbon dioxide is killing off coral reefs around the world, resulting in the loss of a critical barrier to storm surge and further endangering coastal areas at heightened risk from rising seas and stronger and more frequent storms.
Hydropower is increasingly being developed in South America, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, preventing the migration of anadromous fishes and destroying the elaborate flood-regime ecosystems of biomes like the Amazon.
The accelerating rate of animal and plants extinctions under the twin hammers of climate change and habitat loss is being compared to Earth’s five other extinction events that followed catastrophic geophysical change such as meteor impact or sudden tectonic shifts. In the case of the sixth great extinction, however, the root cause is purely biotic: us. Either from directly causing species decline through poaching, habitat conversion and the introduction of competitive exotic species, or by indirectly altering ecosystems through our industrial assault on the planet’s atmosphere, one in eight birds, one in four mammals, one in five invertebrates, one in three amphibians, and half of the world’s turtles are facing the eternal night of extinction.
Given those facts, the Nature Needs Half goal is startling in the grandiosity of its vision and the ambitious range of its projects. It is also, in a word, fair. “Half the world for humanity, half for the rest of life, to make a planet both self-sustaining and pleasant,” is how eminent naturalist E.O. Wilson explains the idea in his book The Future of Life. Other endorsers include marine explorer Sylvia Earle and the Zoological Society of London. And while the scope and scale of Nature Needs Half is unprecedented, conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Fund recognize that connecting biodiverse “hotspots” must guide preservation efforts.
The stated goal of Nature Needs Half is “to ensure that enough wild areas of land and water are protected and interconnected (usually at least about half of any given ecoregion) to maintain nature’s life-supporting systems and the diversity of life on Earth, to ensure human health and prosperity, and to secure a bountiful, beautiful legacy of resilient, wild nature.” Underlying this objective is the assumption that humanity, despite its often destructively “unnatural” behavior, is inescapably a part of life on Earth, and that efforts to preserve and protect untrammeled wilderness areas are ultimately means of assuring that the ecosystem services people depend upon are available to us in the distant future. We’re all in this together, and the sooner H. sapiens gets that through its pointy little head, the better off we’ll all be.
How is “protected” defined? The International Union for the Conservation of Nature defines it quite flexibly: “A protected area is a clearly defined geographical space, recognized, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values.” Thus any number of means may be put into play to preserve land, from conservation easements in Virginia to armed ranger patrols in Namibia; what matters is the end result, namely the retention of naturally functioning ecosystems over time.
During the past two decades scientists have determined that the planet’s ecoregions need at least 50 percent ecological integrity, and in some cases more, to ensure the survival of their biological productivity over the long term. (In plain language, “ecological integrity” means that an area’s biodiversity and basic processes are mostly intact.) The goals of Nature Needs Half simply echo the empirical scientific reality: to function over time the world’s biomes need at least half of their structural integrity preserved from human alteration. We are currently falling short of that. A recent report from Yale’s Environmental Performance Index states that just17 percent of Earth’s terrestrial areas and inland waters, and less than 10 percent of marine areas, are currently protected (though for many parks and refuges in poorer countries this protection is often illusory), while about 43 percent remains relatively open and undeveloped, with low human populations and generally undamaged ecosystems.
Nature Needs Half is pursuing its aim in two simultaneous directions: the protection of at least half of the planet’s mostly intact contiguous wilderness areas — concentrating on Eurasian boreal forests, the Amazon basin and Antarctica — and the identification and protection of those fragments or hotspots of abundant biodiversity that have become isolated islands in a sea of human activity.
The aims of Nature Needs Half are precisely the kind of bold approach, rooted in cutting-edge science, which our increasingly desperate times call for. In an Anthropocene of radical climate change and accelerating species extinctions, nothing less than a grand vision of what might yet be achieved will bring about the preservation of our remaining unspoiled landscapes. As the most farsighted wilderness preservation program on Earth, Nature Needs Half promises to be the kind of revolutionary undertaking that, if its aims are fully or even mostly achieved, will be looked back on centuries from now as perhaps the most important attainment in modern human history.
William H. Funk
William H. Funk is a freelance writer, documentary filmmaker and environmental lawyer living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. His work explores the confluences of the natural world, history, culture, law and politics, and as an attorney he has had broad experience with land preservation and endangered species. He may be contacted at williamfunk3@icloud.com or williamhfunk.weebly.com
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Rather puts my next book chapter, Community, into perspective; that chapter being published in thirty minutes time.
Learning from Dogs 