The Many Incarnations of Mary Sibande

In the spirit of better late than never, I finally wanted to post about a piece for SCOPE I did on the phenomenal artist Mary Sibande, whose work is a vivid exploration of the intersection of the personal and political – as well as being outrageously arresting and beautiful. I hope the images below, courtesy of the artist and Gallery MOMO, will whet your appetite to come and read about her at: www.scope-mag.com/2014/12/incarnations-mary-sibande

 

Cry Havoc, from The Purple Shall Govern, by Mary Sibande

Introspection, from The Purple Shall Govern, by Mary Sibande

 

 

Why We Need to Reinvent the Good Life Now: Thoughts from Davos

When you hear a line like, “It’s all over but the screaming,” you’re curious. But when you hear it at the meeting of the world’s super-elite at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, it really gets your attention. To be sure, it was said in jest. At least sort of: the basic point to which the comment referred is real. We are on the brink of seismic structural and social change.  And we’re not ready.

The overarching themes of the meeting have been widely talked about. Pretty much every journalist snickered that the Davos “Mountain Few” (as Jon Stewart put it) talked a lot about the worrying rise in income inequality, but when 85 people have as much money as the poorest 50% of the world’s population, well, how could they not talk about it? “Extreme science” is reshaping life, death and the very idea of nature (spider genes spliced into goat’s so that there’s spider silk in the goat’s milk, anyone?). Privacy and security are on everyone’s mind in a post-Snowdon world. And, underpinning all of this, as Thomas Friedman pointed out, is the convergence of globalisation and the IT revolution. The two new technologies most up for discussion were 3D printing (we’re already printing human jaws, next it will be houses) and cognitive computing which could replace entire industries.

Taken together, these trends represent fundamental shifts in how our world works. They probably won’t feel like science fiction as they start to unfold – every change builds on one before so we become habituated to them. But they will be profound. The difference isn’t just machines doing our work for us and displacing certain kinds of labour. That trend has been around since the Industrial Revolution. And the difference isn’t just even that the so-called knowledge economy will collapse around us because knowledge per se won’t have much value anymore. Rather, the most significant difference will be in the way these trends could impact deep values like social inclusion, democracy, social stability and a belief in individual growth and potential.

On the threshold of the structural changes we’re in for – and mindful of the potential screaming – it’s more important than ever to be asking some big questions. The ones I heard repeatedly in Davos were where the jobs of the future will come from when whole industries are transformed or eradicated? And how do we avoid winner-take-all economies and the civil unrest that might go with them?

These are important. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee said, societies that don’t think about the future don’t tend to do well there. And there’s no doubt that the world’s governments will need very good policies and practices indeed to manage the coming changes.

But there are other important questions that we need to ask too. And for the most part, I didn’t really hear them in Davos. I was left wondering what it will mean to be human in this new world? And what will we need to flourish? Setting policy aside – what should we as individuals be seeking to nurture in ourselves through the coming transitions?

Considering not just the wealth of data on well-being but also its consistency, I’d venture that the things we’re most going to need to cultivate is connection. Not just social connection through smart phones or Skype or maybe even virtual reality. God knows these have their merits, but we need to think more deeply about the sorts of connections we need to be happy, healthy and (because I think we’ll need it) grounded.

We’re going to need meaningful connections to our own bodies. This means remembering that we’re not machines to monitor and measure (one delegate on a healthcare panel, referring to the wearable device Jawbone, said, “We wouldn’t dream of driving a car without a speedometer, so why are we trying to manage our health without these?”), but rather living animals who need to play and move. We need to walk long distances, dance, jump in puddles, skip and play. We need to be connected to our bodies through the use of them, not just through machines that read back our vital signs to us.

We also need meaningful connections to the world around us through our bodies. We need to touch and feel things with our hands and skin. We will need to gasp at the shock of cold lake water, pull away from the clingy fabric of spiders’ webs, feel comforted by the warm skin of a beloved’s body, and savour the richness of a tomato picked from the garden.

We’re going to need – more than ever – a connection to where we’ve come from, to the traditions that have shaped us and the human skills that are so awesome and beautiful that they’re worth cultivating and keeping even when they’re technically redundant: penmanship, stonemasonry, pottery, baking, needlework and so on.

And we’re going to need connections to a creativity that isn’t defined by or directed to technology alone but rather is valued in whatever form it takes, whether it’s the community spirit of a street musician or the social observation of a novelist.

These comments aren’t a romantic lament for a lost world. In a time in which people seem to be defining themselves as technological optimists or pessimists, I see myself simply as a realist. As it stands, we’ve got a whole lot of evidence that while the material benefits that technological innovation have brought are real and need to be acknowledged, we’re also grappling with unprecedented rates of anxiety, depression, obesity and so on. But there’s plenty of research out there that suggests what humans need to thrive. And it’s not technology, or at least, not just technology. It’s the connections that remind us of our very natures.

As we venture into what Thomas Friedman calls this ‘Gutenberg-scale moment’ let’s keep the notion of the good life front and centre. It should be guiding not only the policy choices with which we’ll be managing these structural changes, but also the daily choices (and refusals) we make.

 

 

 

Our Cameras, Our Minds

I’ve got a new Scope piece out!

“It seems axiomatic that photography is a sighted person’s art form. But Gina Badenoch, who facilitates photography workshops with blind people and marginalized communities, argues that it’s also a language that can connect us to each other, and help us to see.” Please come and read my interview with Gina at: <http://www.scope-mag.com/2013/11/our-cameras-our-minds&gt;.

 

Into the Great Wide Open

I’m thrilled to post that my most recent article for Scope Magazine is now up at the link below. Happy reading – and hope you enjoy some wild time this week!

“Today’s children spend less time in nature than any generation before them. Jon Alexander, brand strategist at the UK’s National Trust, and filmmaker David Bond tell SCOPE about the implications for children’s well-being, and about their ambitious (and irreverent) Project Wild Thing, a documentary that looks at what it would take to get boys and girls back outside.”

You can view the article at: http://www.scope-mag.com/2013/09/into-the-great-wide-open

 

Telling stories for a better China

I’m delighted to share my recent interview with Peggy Liu, for Scope Magazine:

“If rampant consumerism is a cultural — not just economic — phenomenon, can a culture be deliberately changed to minimize its effects? Peggy Liu leads China Dream, a project that aims to achieve nothing less with the world’s most populous nation and oldest civilization. SCOPE asks her how she plans to succeed.”

You may view the latest post at
http://www.scope-mag.com/2013/07/telling-stories-for-a-better-china/

 

In the Trenches

In 1916, my great-grandfather Harry was one of thousands of men in the trenches in France. Their suffering is legendary. But it’s also hard to imagine. Novels, photos, poetry, movies…it’s as close as most of us can get. You might feel something of their fear, camaraderie and revulsion, but it’s usually guided by some sort of interpreter’s hand and veiled by time.

But last year my uncle gave me an extraordinary gift. My great-grandfather had written dozens of letters to his wife and daughters from France in WWI, and over the course of one summer, my uncle and my cousin set about transcribing them. It was hard work. They were faded with age and my great-grandfather’s writing was often unclear. But they eventually got through them and my uncle compiled them in a bound volume and gave a copy to everyone in our family.

The letters begin in Camp Bramshott in England, on what I like to imagine was a fair day in early June 1916, and end just before his death, in France, in October that year. As my uncle notes in his preface, the letters are extraordinary because they tell a great love story between Harry and his wife Edith, but also describe appalling suffering. They’re also matter-of-fact – astonishingly so. There as yet existed no narrative frame or meaning to the war, so he was just describing the experience as he lived it.

While the letters as a whole are gripping, there are a few things that stand out to me. The first is that fear wasn’t necessarily the men’s worst enemy. Some did fall to pieces. Harry writes of one man, W. Craig, who wound up directing traffic as his nerves had “gone completely”. But Harry himself was comparatively sanguine. In one letter, just two weeks before he was killed, he was in the middle of musing about what post-war life would be life when he had to break off due to German bombardment. Catching up later, he wrote:

Just as I was writing the above, the Germans started dropping shells right on our street, and blew down a house. The bricks flew in all directions. They dropped one close to our billets about 30 yards away. There was some excitement I can tell you.

On the other hand, Harry hated the filth and degradation. His letters are peppered with references to the difficulties of keeping clean. He hated the lice (which he called “livestock”) and the mud was no friend either (if “part of the game”, as he put it). In one stint in the trenches, he couldn’t take the same set of clothes off for a month, even at night. On occasion, he was also tormented by self-doubt, in particular, whether he should have enlisted, and how he was possibly helping the war effort doing what he was doing.

But what’s more moving, and I think, instructive, is what kept Harry going. In some ways, it’s the same old human story. Passionate love for his wife, love and affection for his daughters, memories of home and faith in God: these were the shining things that helped him face each day.

However, it wasn’t just the abstract idea of his family, or even the well of his emotions for them, that kept him going. Rather, Harry drew his strength from thinking about specific things that he actually did with his family, like going for walks, working in the garden, or having big Sunday dinners. His love for his family was bound up in their shared experiences; simple family practices that build and sustained their relationships, even when they were separated and he was living amidst horror and suffering.

Of all the things that sustained Harry, the most important seemed to be music. He refers to it often in his letters. For example:

June 16, 1916

I can just picture you all in Saskatoon today. The girls will be good [piano] players now, and I am pleased Louie is learning to play Offenbach’s Barcarolle. It is one of my favourite pieces, and I am sure you will enjoy it. Bells at Eventide will always be one of my favourite pieces dear. It has so many associations attached to it. You will always be able to have good music on Sunday. I think of the many Sundays we had together dear, and how we used to have music after supper, and wonder how soon we shall have the pleasure of having them again.

September 3, 1916

I miss the singing more than anything, after singing so long in the choir. Nearly all the mean from the choir are out here now, and I can quite understand there being only five men singing there [that is, remaining back at home]. However, after the war Charlie will, I hope, take the choir over again, and we shall have the great pleasure of once again singing there. I wish we could all be back to sing the Te Deum when peace is declared.

The last letter he wrote was to his daughters, on October 2, 1916. It’s brief – just four short paragraphs – but in it he says:

I am so pleased to hear that you are doing well with your music. You know how much I would love to hear you both playing. I am looking forward to it very much.

Reading the letters is a pretty overwhelming experience. They are a voice across time, a chance to know a little about the great-grandfather I could never meet, and the formative years of my grandmother, whom I adored. And of course, they’re an incredible reminder of just how brutal war is, and how incredibly lucky we are if we don’t have to go through it. But, more than that, they’re a reminder that you make a family through doing: working together in the garden, going for walks, making music. I remind myself of this now when I have to nag my daughter to practice her piano, or when my son wants to help cook but I know it will take twice the time. All those things are so much more than the moment.

Trench Mortar Image Courtesy of Great War Primary Document Archive: Photos of the Great War – http://www.gwpda.org/photos

Canadian Soldiers in a Trench
Image Courtesy of Great War Primary Document Archive: Photos of the Great War – http://www.gwpda.org/photos

Mira practicing piano at home

 

 

 

Making Soup in a Haunted Restaurant

Monsoon rain is like nothing else. It hammers down from the sky like something solid, not water at all. When you’re outside, you either run like crazy to get out of it or give up entirely and let yourself get soaked.

It’s loud too. In fact it’s so loud that I did a double take when our hostess, Phyu Phyu Tin, owner of Yangon’s (aptly named) Monsoon restaurant told us that the building was haunted. “What?” I whispered to the woman next to me. “Did Phyu Phyu say it was ‘swamped’?” “No, haunted,” she whispered back. Phyu Phyu carried on, her voice raised over the din of the rain and the gentle swoosh of the ceiling fan, “It’s the ghost of a woman. We don’t know who she is. But we tend not to work late alone.”

Phyu Phyu was speaking to twenty-five or so delegates and spouses attending the Young Global Leaders (YGL) meetings at the World Economic Forum’s East Asia Summit earlier this month. It was the second day of the summit and the 300 or so YGL delegates had scattered across Yangon to attend “Impact Journeys” – full day immersions into different facets of Myanmar business, life and culture, from urban infrastructure to healthcare to the arts.

Our group had signed up for a full day immersion into the subject of Myanmar cuisine, with a focus on the potential relationship between Slow Food and economic growth. “Slow Food” refers, of course, to the movement founded by Carlo Petrini. Given that its roots are in Italy, “Slow Food” tends to conjure images of la dolce vita: picnics under olive trees, hand cured meats, artisanal cheeses, earthy wines sipped in the afternoon sun. It can also bring to mind uncomfortable images of food elitism, Tom Wolfe-like scenarios of over-privileged yuppies braying on about the merits of one particular Tuscan olive oil over another.

If you’ve been to (or read up on) Myanmar, which is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, both of those scenarios could actually sound quite grotesque. People in Myanmar, especially in rural areas, don’t always get enough to eat: rice, a staple, can simply be too expensive. Malnutrition makes children vulnerable to childhood illnesses and dysentery. The food transport system is virtually non-existent.

So, why did it make sense for us to be in Phyu Phyu’s humid and elegant restaurant, learning about Burmese cuisine and thinking about Slow Food, while the power dipped in and out and the rains fell outside?

The answer is that Slow Food is more than a gastronomic movement. It’s a political one. Conviviality, nurturing local knowledge and traditions, environmental sustainability, celebrating particular customs in an era of globalized production and consumption…. These aren’t frivolous, or even neutral, values. They are a statement about the importance of human social life and tradition, and about the right of everyone, not just to eat, but to eat in a human, healthy and connected way.

These values are starkly relevant at this moment in Myanmar’s history. For decades, the well-being of the population of Myanmar was subject to the whim of a series of authoritarian generals. Tax rice, devalue the currency, close off trade – it’s going to have a big impact on how and what people eat. But now, under Thein Sein’s leadership, and with Aung San Suu Kyi out of prison at last, Myanmar is on the threshold of change.

This defining moment is precisely why the World Economic Forum was meeting in Myanmar. Should development be allowed to happen pell-mell, or at the dictates of the market? Or should the people of Myanmar – not just its leaders – be empowered to engage in development in a way that fosters the health and well-being of the people of Myanmar as they see it?

The people of Myanmar whom we met, like Phyu Phyu, definitely want things to improve economically, but they also want development that’s human, sustainable and consistent with local values. Phyu Phyu herself described her shock when she visited the US and saw rampant obesity and streets colonized by fast food chains. That wasn’t her vision for prosperity in Myanmar. And that vision is knocking hard at the window: a Korean fast food chicken chain was just about to open a block from our hotel.

Slow Food is also an ideological framework for thinking about how development could unfold in Myanmar. There are concrete expressions of its implications, like the idea of creating a local food festival that celebrates Myanmar cuisine the way the Mistura Festival celebrates Peruvian cuisine. But Slow Food could also frame how other aspects of development go forward, for example, by ensuring that small farmers are included in decision making, by bringing global food brands into conversation with local food producers, and by keeping food justice squarely in the public debate.

Phyu Phyu and her team taught us how to make Burmese lentil soup, “bachelor” chicken curry (so-named as bachelors might make it after a big night out, with a pinch of marijuana if they’re extremely naughty), spicy fish curry, tea leaf salad and Burmese-style spring rolls (based on a Chinese recipe, but jazzed up with tamarind in the dipping sauce). They also taught us a thing or two about the excitement and anxiety of being part of a culture poised on the edge of drastic change. And they reminded us that certain patterns don’t have to be inevitable. Models for the good life exist. They’re there, ready to be adapted for what’s needed. Myanmar can turn on the lights and banish the ghosts – be they of the past or unwanted futures.

“Bachelor” Chicken Curry Ingredients

My contribution!

Mortar and Pestle for pounding chilis

Downtown Yangon

The Sule Pagoda: a focal point of Yangon’s spiritual and political life

 

Action(s) for Happiness

A lot of jokes about happiness are mean. For example, an anonymous post on an Internet joke site says, “What ‘s the difference between a Dementor and marriage? One will suck out every good feeling, every happy memory and drain the remaining peace, hope, and happiness left inside you. The other is a dark creature from a children’s fantasy novel.”

And that’s one of the less cringe-inducing ones.

There’s irony in operation here because many of the subjects that get mocked most – male/female relations, marriage, child-rearing, social participation – are elements of life that have been proven to promote happiness and well-being.

Perhaps “happiness” is an obvious victim for this sort of thing because it sounds so kittens and rainbows. Plus, we might live in a self-help culture, but many of us still feel a little squeamish when it comes to talking about emotional topics. It’s awfully earnest. And, even if you get past that, it can still seem uncomfortably narcissistic. I’ve worried about that very thing in an earlier blog.

But there’s an interesting organization called Action for Happiness that’s trying to change this perspective. AFH is ambitious. Their goal is to create happier societies. Practically this means achieving a whole number of secondary goals: shifting the tone of public discourse, overturning our assumption that we should measure citizens’ progress and well-being by GDP, sifting through insights from fields as diverse as economics and psychology to put together broad patterns of understanding, disseminating information about happiness, and nudging public policy in directions that have been proven to promote happiness and well-being.

The people behind AFH are no self-styled prophets or happy-clappy, bead-wearing hippies. The movement was founded in 2010 by Richard Layard, a Labour peer and professor of economics at the LSE, Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of The Young Foundation, and Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, an independent boarding and day school in the UK.  Each is a leader in their field, well-poised to influence public debate. If you will, they are the Establishment, albeit a progressive side of it.

The ethos on the AFH website is that we can cultivate happiness through action. Indeed, at several points on the site, the quote the Dalai Lama saying, “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” To that end, the website features resources designed to motivate people to do things to boost their happiness. For example, visitors can download a “Happiness Action Pack” created to put “the science of well-being into practice.” This action pack condenses insights from positive psychology into ten areas in our lives in which we can do things to boost our happiness. The first five relate to how we engage with our bodies and the world. It includes things like giving, connecting to other people and exercising. The second five relate more to managing our outlook and emotions, which includes setting goals, being positive and accepting oneself.

Perhaps because of the apparent simplicity of these messages, combined with the fact that one could imagine seeing this sort of thing in some of the fluffier women’s magazines, critics have suggested that AFH’s approach is facile. Writing in The Guardian last year, David Harper, a Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London, said that AFH’s approach is “based on two flawed assumptions: that the source of unhappiness lies in people’s heads – in how they see the world, and that the solution lies in change at the level of the individual.”

To be sure, this line of thinking exists in AFH and in the wider world. It’s even got quite a pedigree. The Stoics said something along these lines. Buddhism does too. WB Yeats wrote that the soul is “self-delighting, self-appeasing and self-affrighting.”  And, thanks to YouTube, we’ve recently seen a surge in attention for David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” in which he urges graduates to take the opportunity to choose what they think about in order to transcend the boring, crushing or soulless moments of our lives.

This perspective probably has endured for some thousands of years because there’s some truth in it.

But it’s not the whole truth. For, while we do have remarkable abilities to school our minds, hearts and bodies to cultivate behaviors that help us cope with suffering and embrace happiness, of course the external world has an impact on us.

And this is where AFH’s critics aren’t quite being fair. In fact, AFH’s work is so interesting precisely because they acknowledge both sides of the coin. They seem a lot less interested in pushing all the responsibility either to society or the individual, and a lot more focused on simply seeing how the science of happiness tallies up and what we can actually do about it.

Some of the action does need to come from industry and government: no question. People are happier when they’re valued, so dehumanizing work processes are going to foment unhappiness. People feel happier when they live in clean and secure environments, so public policy that allows environmental degradation is going to spread misery. But even here we’re theoretically not entirely subject to the whims of state, at least, not in democracies. We can vote. We can create campaigns. We can create art. We can write stories. We can find ways to enter the public debate and try to influence happiness-promoting practices and policies.

But perhaps one of the most interesting spheres for action that AFH talks about is that which lies right at the meeting point of the individual and his or her community. It’s not policy, it’s not just positive thinking…it’s the stuff we do daily as we interact with the people around us. In an interview for the digital commons site openDemocracy, Geoff Mulgan alludes to the idea that engagement spurs well-being.* And the actions that AFH’s website encourage include examples of these small-scale but meaningful points of engagement: between parents and children, people and their workplaces and people and their communities. Just to take one example, they suggest volunteering. They cite the science that shows how volunteering boosts happiness and they provide a whole heap of resources to get people going. It’s not that sexy, but it’s right.

Mean humour, alas, might provoke a wry smile, but it doesn’t promote happiness. But connection and engagement do. And if Action for Happiness is as successful as they deserve to be, we’ll all be feeling the positive effects of their efforts.

* I am taking a few liberties with Mulgan’s extremely interesting interview here, but I think this is very much in the spirit of what he says.

 

How to Thrive: Insights from a Conversation with best-selling author Dan Buettner

Dan Buettner is the New York Times best-selling author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest (with a terrific second edition just out) and Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way.

He is one of those rare people who is simultaneously a reflective thinker and a super-charged ball of positive energy. A National Geographic Fellow, he’s thought hard about, and traveled the world to explore, questions that matter to all of us. Are there genuine secrets to living longer, healthier lives? And can we foster happiness and well-being? He’s sought to answer these questions by examining the behaviors and lifeways of people in “Blue Zones”, that is, exceptional pockets of the world where, statistically, people live the longest or report greater life satisfaction than the average.

Recently, Dan was good enough to speak with me about his work, and the lessons we can extract from it to think about what really matters in creating a good life. While the whole conversation was fascinating, I thought I’d post one of the segments that I found most compelling, where Dan talks about the choices we can make to promote well-being in our own lives, and the importance of cultivating belonging.

LMR: What do you see as the fundamental relationship between health and happiness?

DB: Happiness is worth about 8 years of additional life expectancy. There are a few behaviors that contribute to both. For example, we know that the happiest Americans are socializing six hours a day. We also know that loneliness takes years off your life. Loneliness is as bad for you as a smoking habit. So by proactively going out and surrounding yourself with healthy friends, it’s not only going to make you healthier – because health is a positive contagion – it’s also likely to make you happier.

And also physical fitness. Going out and taking a walk. It triggers endorphins. It makes you feel good. But we also know that walking is associated with anywhere from 4-6 extra years of life expectancy.

I didn’t set out to find these things, but both books were kind of worldwide meta-analyses of populations who are the paragons of happiness and longevity. So I tried to get all the data in the world and find the best. And then distill down what they do. And if you boil down longevity, and you boil down happiness, and you overlay them, you see about an 80% overlap.

LMR: Do you feel, when you see that overlap, you’re seeing something about what it means to be human?

DB: I see the overlap of what it takes to have a rich life. What it means to be human is to procreate, from a strictly evolutionary point of view.

LMR:  So when I hear your stories, I wonder if they’re telling us something about the nature of our humanity. The kinds of things are so deeply or necessary to us they tell us something about our nature or being?

DB: One easy answer is socializing. We’ve succeeded as a species because somewhere along the evolutionary arc, we’ve figured out that collaborating increases our chance of survival. And, like so many things, when you satisfy that thing that increases our chances of survival, our bodies are hardwired to reward us. When you’re thirsty and we drink, it feels good. When you’re hungry and you eat, it feels good. When you’re horny and you have sex, it feels good. And these are all things that make it more likely that we’ll have kids. I think it’s this reward loop. Well, the same thing with socializing. We cooperate. When you look at the Blue Zones around the world, they typically are in pretty harsh environments. And the reason they survived is because they cooperate. You look at the Sardinian shepherds, for example. They don’t even all own their own parcel of land. But they live in tiny villages and they get together. So, when it comes to our humanity where…it’s realizing that there is a genetic satisfaction that comes from good social connections. And we should always favour that over consumption.

LMR: When you were in doing research…this is primarily directed at the longevity populations, did the people you were talking to ever have an articulation of the good life the way we would use it? Was there a sense of what life was all about that they collectively shared?

DB: Yeah, I think it’s a profound sense of belonging to where they came from. And if you look at the Sardinians, life is about my kids. I work, not to get ahead in the world, not to buy a second vacation home, not to have a nicer car. I don’t…if I have free time, it’s never at the expense of my family. And we heard this over and over. I don’t have massive data, other than…I have an N of about 50 people. And you saw the emphasis of the family among those populations.

LMR: Interesting. The sense of…going back to what you said about having a profound sense of belonging to where they came from…do you mean from within a familial lineage, or also within a cultural or even an environmental, like a connection to place?

DB: The latter. In other words, they weren’t just rebels without a cause. They’re not the type of people who bounce through life, move around. They’re planted.

LMR: I also wondered if you think that not having an icki gai [a purpose in life] can cause people pain? And I ask that because clearly having one is the presence of a positive, so is not having one just the absence of that positive, or is it the presence of a negative? Do people wind up feeling…I mean, I guess this is just going into hypothesis-land, but more lost, or feeling like there’s something absent in their life that causes them pain?

DB: Yeah, I think there’s an existential pain in that unrootedness.

LMR: And, with the work that you’re doing with the Blue Zones communities [“a systems approach that brings together the citizens, businesses and institutions of a given community to foster well-being”], are you saying that we can self-consciously create some of these things?

DB: Yes. First of all, you can choose where you move and I think that’s…people dismiss that. “Oh…I’m not going to move.” Well, the average American, and probably the average Canadian, moves ten times in a lifetime. So you can choose to live out in some culturally barren suburb, or you can find a neighborhood where neighbors know each other and there are parks and playgrounds full of people. And a place where you’re going to be nudged into social…you can walk down to a café, or a store…. That’s going to have a bigger impact on your happiness, and I argue your longevity, than just about anything else you can do. So, OK, well, what else? All right, your husband lives in a suburb and he ain’t moving. The next line of proactivity you can pursue is finding…build your own social network. You don’t have to hang out with the toxic woman who bitches about her life, or the friend that sits and watches reruns of Gossip Girls all day long and drinks Diet Coke. We can all create our own social networks and support that give energy to the positive.

 

Where’s Your Body Been?

After watching my four year old son attack his great-uncle the other day, then play tag on the lawn with his twenty-something cousin, I thought about writing a short blog on why connecting across different generations might be part of the new good life.

But then there was the episode with the flamingoes.

And I realized that I was observing something in the children that was equally true for all of us.

We were at Jungle Gardens in Sarasota. Jungle Gardens is a sort of glorified petting zoo for alligators and the like. They have this shtick going where you can buy food for the flock of flamingos that live by a pond on site. Up close, flamingoes are really rather wonderful creatures. They’re a gorgeous shade of pink, with black feathers underneath their wings like some sort of haute couture inspired fashion accent. They have long, bendy necks that they contort into improbable twists and loops when they tuck their heads into their wings to sleep. But they’re also kind of goofy: they have big beaks, beady eyes and they honk when they call.

We did a first pass round to feed the flamingoes (going past, I might add, the religiously-inspired “Garden of Christ”… “Well,” my daughter Mira said when we’d passed it, “that was unexpected”) but the flamingoes were arranged around their pond, fast asleep. Despite Jamie’s enthusiastic calling (he’s four), they just ignored us and snoozed on. We admired them for a while, including their ability to sleep whilst standing on one foot, then gave up and went to see the reptile show.

Half an hour later, we returned and found the flamingoes just waking up. At least their leader was, and his cross-sounding honks roused them all. Whether it was too early, or that they were simply overfed, they didn’t seem interested in our food. But Jamie was unwilling to give up and, quivering with excitement, he stood there with his hand outstretched. Finally, a haughty looking flamingo strutted (there’s no other word for it) over, turned his head, and peered at Jamie out of one eye. Jamie cooed at it, and it finally disdained to nibble some of the food from his hand. The bird, which easily bigger than he was, was surprisingly gentle as it picked at its little pellets. Jamie almost levitated with delight. I don’t know if the flamingo got much out of it, but for Jamie, it was clearly meant a lot to be touching (or rather touched by) something so wonderful and alien.

It would be reasonable to wonder what playing with extended family and feeding flamingoes have in common.

I think it’s the sense of being fully in one’s body and connecting to other things through one’s body. Florida was beautiful, and it was fun to be on spring break. But it was also striking that we were all so physical. Not just active, but moving through the world in a way that connected us to other things, especially each other and the natural world. We walked at the shoreline, put our hands and feet in the same water in which we’d seen dolphins swimming, played with each other, fed the flamingoes and dug in the sand. By contrast, in our normal life, we spend an awful lot of time in cars and at desks and computers.

For sure there’s a “what I did on holiday” aspect to this observation. But the holiday was really just the opportunity to see the larger point. Our bodies are the fundamental vehicle through which we connect with the world. The people, animals and things we touch; the elements in which we immerse ourselves; the food we eat…these are the things that reveal the world to us. And through the plain and fundamental action of touch, we understand – in the truest way possible – that we’re connected to the world.