photo: Primal Strand, from the book Emeralds at the Edge by Andy Wright

What does it mean to “walk away from civilization culture”? Essentially, it means no longer accepting its messages or its worldview, and, as much as possible, no longer participating in it as a “consumer”, “reader”, “viewer”, “listener”, “citizen” or “employee”. Because this culture is now global and ubiquitous, there is no escape from it, so walking away means living on the Edge of it.

I have had the good fortune to survive and benefit from civilization culture, so walking away from it now, for me, is easy. For most, it takes courage, knowledge, and a bit of sacrifice. And I don’t blame or disparage those who still live within its clutches — for most there is no real choice.

When I walked away from civilization culture, I disconnected myself from everyone who is still caught up in that culture, still believes in it, depends on it and thinks it’s real. It’s not something you can do half way: When I rejected the culture, I rejected it entirely. So:

• I no longer believe anything I read in the mainstream media — I realize it’s all distraction or propaganda, even though some of it is earnest and well-intended. When people ask me my opinion on something they’ve read or heard in the media, I have to explain that it’s nonsense, meaningless, a ridiculous oversimplification, intended to produce comfort and complacency, or simply to entertain. It’s hard to say this without hurting people’s feelings or sounding arrogant, but it’s impossible to weasel out of telling people that they’re idiots to be paying any attention to this crap, that’s it’s completely disconnected from reality, from what’s really going on in the world. Then people want to know (if they’re still talking to me after this) how it got that way, and why I’m so sure it’s wrong. What can I tell them? — It’s too hard to explain this and re-educate someone in less than a few hours.
• I no longer relate to what the entertainment industry, including popular writers and artists, are producing. The New Yorker magazine, for example, recently published its “20 Under 40″ feature — short stories by 20 leading writers under the age of 40. The stories are, almost without exception, about people living and struggling in competitive civilization culture. How can intelligent young people still be preoccupied with the tedium of wage-slave work and the bar scene and the banality of consumerist life, when our civilization culture is collapsing and we have no plan for coping with what is happening all around us? What planet, I ask myself as I read this intense, well-crafted stuff, are these people living on? Why aren’t they writing about something important?
• In film, fiction and music, the recurring theme is finding and losing one’s only true love, about love as a scarce resource and about love’s competitiveness and exclusivity. As someone who is poly, all the angst-filled stories about infidelity and not being able to find or keep “the one” have about as much resonance for me as stories of space aliens in another dimension. And I have given up watching movies because they are either (a) so steeped in the transparently false propaganda of civilization culture that they’re as nauseating to me as Nazi or McCarthyist brainwashing films, or (b) totally designed to provoke mindless adrenaline, dopamine. testosterone or other chemical rushes — the video escapist equivalent of mainlining heroin. It’s all pornography to me, gratuitous and unbearable to watch.
• I no longer relate to what most people do with their “leisure” time. I just can’t fathom the idea of working 80-hour weeks to save up money to go to some resort or “holiday destination” where you either do nothing, or spend all your time in distracting sports, games, organized tourist trips, spirituality and self-improvement courses or other consumption activities. Nor can I fathom the idea of hitting a white ball around a chemical-soaked, over-watered, sterilized “fairway”, or watching anything on a TV (particularly reality shows where everything is competition and the enjoyment seems to revolve around watching people publicly humiliate themselves).
• Most blog articles seem to be about consumerist technology, about really bad music, about inane “popular culture”, about mainstream politics, or about what people do for a living. How can people care about new social software tools or about business or education trends or about how Obama is fucking up this week or about what is happening at the latest X-by-YZ conference, when in a few years none of this will matter to anyone, and when the crises our world is facing right now are being ignored?
• There is pretty compelling evidence that the political and economic systems that are accelerating our collapse are not reformable, and that both personal “green” actions and political activism, while essential responsibilities of each of us, will have only a tiny collective impact in mitigating and/or delaying this collapse. So I have no desire to debate these issues, while even the most intelligent people I know who are still caught within civilization culture seem interested in talking about nothing else but these issues.
• Knowing what I do now about the damage the education system inflicts and the propaganda it conveys, and the option of unschooling, I would never subject anyone I cared about to the unnecessary trauma of this system. Yet most of the people I know still believe in this system, think it’s the key to change, and seem even to be addicted to it. When will they learn the truth about learning?

I have taken to heart Dark Mountain’s challenge that it is irresponsible, unforgivable, to do any work that is not devoted to the representation of civilization culture for what it really is, or in opposition to the worst manifestations of that culture, or the imagination, preparation and resiliency-building needed to transition to the next, post-collapse culture. But almost no one seems ready for this work, or willing or able to hear its terrible messages, its awful truths.

I’ve been ranting that I’m tired of conversation, and I thought this was because of the inherent limits of our modern languages. But I’m beginning to think it’s not so much the limits of language as that, having rejected every notion of civilization culture, I no longer have anything to talk about with most people.

When I’m out in public I often listen to conversations, and what I hear is nothing but vapid time-wasting, echo-chamber reassurances, regurgitated propaganda, sob stories, unactionable rhetoric, appalling misinformation, self-aggrandizement, gossip, manipulation and denigration of others. I hear no new ideas or insights, no cogent discussion of how we can prepare for, and increase our resilience in the face of, the impending sixth great extinction and the economic, energy and ecological collapses that will push that extinction into overdrive and bring down the most expansive and least sustainable civilization in our species’ short history. And what else is worth talking about?

Yet, all around me, people who have not had the luxury of time and resources, as I have, to learn how the world really works, and what is really going on, and to imagine what we might do about it, and how we might live better, carry on as if nothing much is wrong and as if everything in our unsustainable and doomed culture somehow makes sense, and will somehow continue, and get better.

For much of my life I felt as if I were the one living in another, twilight world, shut off from everybody else, unable to make sense of, connect with and be part of the seemingly exciting world they lived in. But now I feel it is all these people, lost in illusion, who are in the twilight world, the one that makes no sense and has no substance. Part of me wants to rescue them, but part of me knows that they are not ready or able to listen, that their worldview is so utterly different from mine that it is as if we spoke unfathomably different languages.

There is a kind of comfort in learning so much, in being “too far ahead”, in knowing that I am more aware of the terrible truths of this world and of our time, than most people can or will ever be.

But it is a cold and lonely comfort, one suffused with grief and a sense of anomie, rootlessness, purposelessness, directionlessness. As I am reconnecting with all-life-on-Earth I am disconnecting from the culture I have known all my life, and all the people attached to it. It is a bleak and anti-social journey I am on, and knowing that it’s right, and inevitable, and will help me become nobody-but-myself again, is, at this frightening moment, small solace.

The bird pictured at right  (credit Roland Jordahl) is a Swainson’s Thrush, a regular summer visitor here on Bowen Island. Like most birds, it has both “songs” and “calls”. The songs tend to be more melodious and variable — each bird’s is slightly different. The calls are simpler, standard and more abrupt. Here is the song, followed by the call, of the Swainson’s Thrush.

I imagine that songs and calls convey entirely different types of messages. Songs, I think, are a bird’s way of expressing herself — what she feels and who she is. Calls, I would think, are urgent messages to the flock or potential flockmates, such as “come” or “danger”.

Some smarter birds, like the corvids and parrots, are excellent mimics. They have such a vast repertoire of others’ songs and calls (those of other birds, people, animals and even inanimate sounds) that we rarely hear their own song. Yet according to ornithologist Bernd Heinrich, ravens, when alone, will sing themselves to sleep. Only in private moments, perhaps, do they sing their own true song.

There is a theory espoused by some scientists that wild creatures spend the bulk of their lives in “Now Time”, a kind of recursive time-out-of-time that stretches out seemingly forever — what we feel sometimes when we say that “time has stopped”. In these moments out of time, the theory says, these creatures are utterly present, totally a part of the oneness of all-life-on-Earth.

In moments of stress, they quickly snap out of Now Time into Clock Time, when instincts of fight-or-flight kick in, adrenaline pumps, the mind and heart race to keep up with the sudden break-neck pace of time, and all their energies are focused on identifying and responding appropriately to the source of stress.

I imagine that birds’ calls are mostly alerts to shift out of Now Time into Clock Time. Then, once the cause of the stress is gone, the creature quickly re-enters Now Time, with soft clucks of comfort that signal “all clear”, when the creature is free to sing her song once again.

I wonder if the “smarter” creatures on our planet have fewer songs and more calls by virtue of their (our) greater awareness of all the potential dangers and their (our) greater population density (a result of evolutionary success and adaptive skill) — to the point we end up so chronically stressed we never have the opportunity to shift into Now Time. Perhaps we lose the capacity to do so entirely, from lack of opportunity and practice.

This would seem to be the message of many New Age pundits — that we need to find ways and practices to rediscover this presence, slow our lives down to relearn the capacity to enter into Now Time, the seemingly eternal present.

Artists, I think, have this sense, this capacity, more than most others. They seem able to immerse themselves, to open themselves to what is present, to set aside temporarily the pervasive stresses of our civilization and really see, feel, and re-present, what really is. I wonder whether our human languages, designed as they are for the conveyance of commands, instruction and information, are really just elaborate sets of calls, and whether it is in poetry, story, art and music that our human songs find their voice.

As I focus my new life more on creative activities — writing music, stories and poetry — perhaps I am seeking ways to create, or discover, my own song. What nuances and messages would be captured in this song, what expressions of nobody-but-myself? My guess is that it would have notes of joy and others of melancholy, sounds that convey a passion to learn and to play and to imagine what is possible, to reflect and express and explore, and to love. Could a song be subtle enough to convey all this, and even accentuate those passions that I believe I am more (or less) gifted at, and which are “on purpose” for me rather than just for fun?

Perhaps this is what all our conversations, the endless cacophony of words we speak and write and think, are all directed at — expressing, both for our own evolving sense of self and for the discovery of others, who we really are.

What, do you imagine, is your true song?

(photo from Kevin Cameron at Bastish)

I‘ve just finished reading a book that Tree gave me, called Birdology. It describes author Sy Montgomery’s experience with hens, pigeons, crows, hawks, parrots, hummingbirds and cassowaries. It’s an easy, fun read, but if you really want to know about the social life and intelligence of birds, you’d probably prefer Bernd Heinrich’s books (especially Mind of the Raven), and if you want to know more about animal emotions I’d steer you instead to Jeff Masson’s books (especially When Elephants Weep). Since I already knew that birds are very intelligent (some species more than others), and that they’re capable of complex emotions, I didn’t learn a lot from Birdology. But one idea, introduced in the first chapter (on hens) kept me reading.

That idea is that, while birds are remarkable intelligent and social, their emotional spectrum, while probably as deep as ours, is significantly different from ours. They exhibit impatience, anger, playfulness, joy, jealousy, contentedness, fear, frustration and affection, in ways any human would recognize. Some species (raptors) have an emotion that is, mercifully, relative rare in humans: It’s called yarak, and the closest human equivalent is probably blood-lust. Because they face so many risks, birds tend to be more intuitive and less reflective than humans, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: there just isn’t time to make most decisions thoughtfully. The instinctive ‘rage’-like quality of the yarak emotion has probably served hunting birds well. I wonder if this same instinctive emotion is what impels parents of many species (ours included) to attack predators with super-normal strength when their offspring are threatened. I think Darwin would agree.

It was another emotional difference described in the book, however, that really piqued my interest. The author charges that, while almost all species of birds can be very affectionate, many seem to be lacking in compassion. While they give their all for their offspring, and show strong bonding to both mates and community, they don’t seem to be deeply emotionally affected when one of their kind is suffering or killed. In fact, they will often turn on, and drive out, an injured member of the flock (the author speculates this is because the weak member is likely to attract predator attention and threaten the whole flock). And when they lose an offspring, their behaviour is initially intuitive, almost autonomic, but then seems largely indifferent. Given that the smarter species of birds have excellent memories, this is clearly not because the birds have forgotten their lost or killed children. What, then, accounts for this seemingly cold-blooded and ‘heartless’ behaviour?

The author does not speculate on this, but I will: My theory is that when you are a member of a ‘prey’ species, where your odds of dying young and the odds of your babies being eaten are high, compassion is too expensive an emotion to sustain. Grief is a debilitating emotion, and animals that exhibit it (elephants, whales, and humans, among others) become vulnerable to depression and incapacitation. It makes sense, then, that while compassion provides an evolutionary advantage to social animals by adding empathy and cohesion to the group, it is an evolutionary disadvantage to creatures that experience loss of loved ones regularly and at a high rate, since grief and compassion are, it appears, inseparable. So over millennia, compassion would be selected in creatures at low risk of frequent loss of loved ones, and selected out in creatures at high risk of such loss. The grief is just too much to bear, in every sense.

If this is true, it has some awesome implications. It may account for the different emotional ‘temperatures’ of dogs (canids) and cats (felines) in affluent countries, even though both types of animals are very affectionate and otherwise much like us in their emotional behaviour (cats have a much higher mortality rate). That might even account for some people being ‘dog’ people and others ‘cat’ people.

More importantly, it might explain why, when population pressures increase relative to available space and food, and result in high rates of mortality or threats to life and security, over time the species may become emotionally inured to suffering — less compassionate.

Some obvious questions stem from this:

1. Could this account for much of the ‘inuring’ behaviour in the modern world — from street gangs to school bullies to prison populations to hazing rituals to military behaviour to the psychopathy of workers in factory farms and slaughterhouses? Are we intuitively learning to become less compassionate because, especially in these particularly vulnerable, violent environments, compassion and grief are just unbearable?
2. We see particularly high rates of pathological insensitivity and brutality in countries (like China) that have long histories of suffering, deprivation, violence and starvation, in countries (like Congo) whose people face horrific overpopulation and ecological collapse, and in countries (like the US) whose survival depends on the ruthless oppression of other countries and whose Gini index (the gap between rich and poor) is obscenely large and obvious. Are the huge rates of crime, imprisonment, genocide, violence and mental illness in those countries a reflection of the growing suppression of our compassionate natures as our unsustainable civilization reaches its breaking point?

We are, after all, animals. Why should we remain compassionate creatures if, at some point, the disadvantage of endless and unbearable grief exceeds the advantage of the social cohesion that compassion engenders?

And if we do become, like the birds and the insects (the creatures predicted to dominate on Earth after the sixth great extinction our behaviour has precipitated occurs), still smart, and still fierce, but also devoid of compassion, what does that mean for the Long Emergency we face in the decades to come? Do the ‘Mad Max’ dystopians have it right after all?

cartoon by hugh macleod

“Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel” – Neil Young, On the Way Home

In Grade Two I learned not to feel. Until then I felt everything, with all my heart — I fell in love for the first time when I was five, and the world was perfect. In our neighbourhood we’d play tag or hide-and-seek or football or go skating or just bounce a ball against the steps to see who could catch it, until the sun went down and we could hardly see, or in the winter until the moonlight and lamplights made the new-fallen snow glisten like diamonds, and our hands and feet got numb from the cold and we’d stoke the wood fireplace in the temporary shed beside the outdoor skating rink. And we’d sing our hearts out. And cry inconsolably for hours when a tiny bird crashed against our windows and our attempts to nurse it to health with sugar water in an eyedropper didn’t work. And stories were as real as life. And we’d get so intoxicated by some moment of simple joy we’d  laugh until we fell down or threw up. And we’d race home in torrential and violent thunderstorms, fearless, drying ourselves sitting in front of the hot air radiator, with the smells of dinner coming from the kitchen.

But in Grade Two something changed. Some of the kids at school started to lie. Or to threaten to hit you or take something from you. Or they’d say things just to be mean, even the girls. Where everything had been cooperative, collaborative before, now everything was a competition, and if you weren’t smart, fast, coordinated, tall, unblemished, well, you were a loser. If you were good at school but not smart in other things you were a suck, which was worse than being stupid. And for the girls you loved, it was no longer enough to be authentic, to care, to be imaginative and playful and faithful. You had to be handsome, clever, worldly, funny in a new and impossibly complicated way. You had to be something you weren’t, and couldn’t be, and didn’t want to be.

It became dangerous to feel too much. The twisted kids who you used to feel sorry for discovered they could manipulate others, and in the anarchy of the schoolyard they suddenly had power. It was like they were inflicting the damage inside them on everyone else and no one was saying anything, as if what they were doing was normal, or impossible to stop. Kids who’d been in boarding schools or juvenile detention centres bragged about how tough they were, that they were survivors and you’d better get tough or life would get very hard for you.

So I learned to stop feeling. I withdrew into myself, and was labeled a “shy kid”, which I’d never been, and for nearly ten years I lived in a world of my own, a “daydreamer”, a disengaged and marginal student, an “underachiever”. I would let homework pile up until I was sick with dread about getting caught out, and then work like mad to get most of it done, but I’d never really get caught up. If a girl talked to me, which happened rarely, I would almost pass out from anxiety, from not knowing what to say. I was completely disconnected from the world and from myself. I couldn’t dance, or swim, or do sports. I was no fun. I just wanted the world to go back to the way it once was. Eventually I forgot what that was like; it was too hard and painful to remember. Finally I stopped feeling lonely because I couldn’t remember or imagine any other way to be. That was the last thing I stopped feeling.

I was rescued, in my last year of high school, by an Unschooling pilot program that I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog. My adult life was, until recently, plagued by bouts of deep depression and chronic anxiety, but at 18 I had broken through, become functional, learned to love again, and to believe (perhaps too much) in myself. I had become, after years detached from reality, an incorrigible idealist, and still am, for all the good that’s done me. When you live inside your head, in your imagination, every dose of hard reality is a blow, a disappointment, a fall from brief and fleeting grace. But I had learned to be clever at a few things, thanks to my peers, and that cleverness and a renewed self-confidence combined to make my adulthood one of almost uninterrupted success, at least in the ways that our society measures it — position, money, material possessions. Purpose.

I was happy with my success. I was, most of the time, numb. The one feeling I had that came up fairly often was anger, and it was ugly, so I learned to suppress it. I was good at suppressing things in myself. I’d had a lot of practice. And when crises came up I coped with them the way I always did — a mix of retreat into depression, anxiety, procrastination, and, finally, figuring out all by myself what had to be done and, when there was no other choice, doing it.

Thirty years later I woke up and realized that what I wanted in life was not the many things I’d achieved and acquired, and that in their pursuit and accomplishment I’d forgotten about the things that I once thought were most important: Ending the devastation of our planet, which was now being perpetrated by, mostly, stupid white men of my own once-idealistic generation. Stopping the suffering of animals. Bringing human population back to sustainable levels. Bringing equity and justice and dignity and opportunity to the 99% of the population who struggle all their lives against impossible and unfair odds just to survive and to be, once in a while, happy.

For the last decade, most of it chronicled in this blog, I’ve tried to understand how the world really works and why it’s so awful (at least, to an idealist), and what we could do to create better ways to live and make a living. I’ve learned a lot, and, I told myself, as soon as I retired I would put this new knowledge, and my new health (the result of overcoming a terrible illness four years ago, also well chronicled in this blog), to good use.

This year, I retired.

For the last few months I’ve lived the life most people dream of — retired comfortably from paid work, living in a paradise, debt-free, worry-free, loved, loving, open to love, very healthy, free from any onerous responsibilities or commitments, and free to do (or not do) whatever I want each day.

As some people warned me might happen, I’ve become a bit lazy (and perhaps hazy) as a result. I’ve made far too little progress on my What You Can Do (to make the world a better place) list of intentions*. So what am I doing with my time? Bottom line: I’m not spending any more time on reconnection, capacity/competency building, activism, new model creation, reflective and creative activities  than I did when I was working full-time (i.e. still three hours a day). The six hours a day (average over a seven-day week) I used to spend working I now spend in play, in cooking and housekeeping.

I tell myself I deserve to spend some extra time playing — just doing whatever I feel like doing on the spur of the moment each day — as part of the transition from paid work and as part of learning how to manage my days effectively and responsibly now that I have no external demands on my time.

But I have this gnawing feeling that, freed from anxiety, I’m actually getting ’spacey’ — even more disconnected from the real world, and from my feelings. For example, I recently hiked around the Island to three of Bowen’s best beaches, and then played around with the photos I took of them, for hours; and I used telephoto pictures, Google maps, Google earth and triangulation tools to identify most of the mountains and houses I can see in the distance from my new house. And I’ve spent quite a bit of time meeting new people and attending various events I would never have found time for when I was working, just for fun. These are pastimes, diversions.

All of it has been somewhat disconnecting, and left me disengaged from the real world. These activities are mostly pretty superficial and emotionless. I’ve begun to wonder whether, suddenly finding myself without other people making demands on my time , telling me what I must or should be doing, and without constant feelings of time pressure and expectations — my freedom from anxiety has become freedom from feeling.

What is it I’m ‘diverting’ myself from? Why is it that I’m only really connected with my feelings:

• When I listen to good music,
• When I fall in love,
• When I play with animals, or
• When something, late at night, usually connected with water, or wind, or light, or the sounds of wild creatures, stirs my heart?

I came to this island, this paradise, for sanctuary — protection and healing. Sanctuary from what?

In the gorgeous Reid & Shamblin song “I Can’t Make You Love Me“, made famous by Bonnie Raitt, about not having a choice when it comes to love, there’s a line:

“You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t”

What is the matter with my heart?

—–

[*My 'Report Card' on my five sets of 2010 Intentions, to date:

1. Some aspects of my morning Reconnection practices (meditation, exercise, presencing, art/music composition, gratitude, body/senses/feelings/instinct awareness, letting go, and spending time in wild places) get done periodically. But it's hardly a daily practice.
2. I've made limited progress in starting my afternoon Capacity/Understanding/Competency Building activities, Activism projects and New Model Creation activities.
   • I had intended to increase my competency or capacity in ten areas: presentation skills, conversation skills, demonstration skills, creative writing skills, self-awareness, facilitation skills, problem/stress management, life balance, time management and empathy. I've taken a few workshops but I don't think I've made any significant headway (e.g. from my work on empathy I've mostly learned that I'm misanthropic). I have been learning to cook, and to host. And I'm still learning how the world really works, which is endlessly time-consuming.
   • My first set of Activism projects (facilitating collaborations of people working to find creative, effective, ideally non-violent ways to stop the Alberta Tar Sands, and factory farming) haven't made it past the early planning stages.
   • Likewise my New Model Creation intentions -- other than a bit of writing I've done next to nothing to advance any of my four favourite better-way-to-live models/movements: Unschooling, the Gift/Generosity/Relationship Economy, Intentional Community, and Transition to a post-civ society. And my novel/film script, imagining a strange, joyful, amazingly diverse post-civilization human society, remains unwritten.
3. My evening Reflection and Creation practices (blogging, creative writing, music composition, dance, play, drawing and photography) started well, but (except for play) have since slowed. My blogging pace is the slowest it's ever been.]

Don’t read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals. You don’t want, or need, to hear the results of his extensive, hands-on research into factory farming. You don’t want to hear yet another reformed vegan tell you:

• The six main reasons to be vegan:
  1. to reduce the ghastly and endless suffering of billions of thinking, feeling creatures;
  2. to live healthier and longer;
  3. to reduce global air and water pollution, land degradation, water shortages and climate change impact;
  4. to reduce the risks of pandemic diseases carried by genetically identical, sick, mutilated, confined chemical-soaked animals;
  5. to eat (when the external costs and agribusiness subsidies are factored out) less expensively;
  6. to end the atrocities and human psychological damage that occur in industrial animal slaughterhouses;
• “Someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.”
• “The controversy around PETA may have less to do with the organization [and its tactics] than with those of us who stand in judgment of it — that is, with the unpleasant realization that ‘those PETA people’ have stood up for the values we have been too cowardly or forgetful to defend ourselves.”
• “The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.”
• It’s a myth that “free-range” or “organic” animal products are more humane than factory farmed products.
• [quote from a rancher of unmutilated, undrugged, un-genetically modified animals, one of the dwindling number who now collectively produce less than 0.5% of US animal products] “Michael Pollan wrote about Polyface Farm in The Omnivore’s Dilemma like it was something great, but that farm is horrible. It’s a joke. Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference… KFC chickens are almost always killed in 39 days. They’re babies. That’s how rapidly they’re grown. Salatin’s organic free-range chicken is killed in 42 days. ‘Cause it’s still the same chicken. It can’t be allowed to live any longer because its genetics are so screwed up… These aren’t things, they’re animals, so we shouldn’t be talking about good enough. Either do it right or don’t do it.”
• Many of the workers in modern industrial slaughterhouses find the atrocities and suffering they witness every day so desensitizing that they become deranged sadists, and slaughterhouse owners ‘cover’ for the horrific acts they then routinely commit on animals.
• The American Dietary Association has repeatedly confirmed that “vegetarian [including vegan] diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life-cycle, including pregnancy, infancy, adolescence, and for athletes…[and such] diets tend to be lower in saturated fats and cholesterol and higher in fiber, magnesium, potassium, vitamin C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals…[and] are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, lower risk of hypertension, lower risk of type 2 diabetes… and lower cancer rates.” In addition, they note that vegetarians and vegans have more optimal protein consumption than carnivores, since excess animal protein intake increases the risk of osteoporosis, kidney and urinary tract diseases and some cancers.

You don’t need to read the book. You know all this. There are reasons you still consume animal products, that are, inevitably, factory farmed. Eating is, after all, a social activity. It makes people really uncomfortable to tell them you’re vegan, and talking about it is hard. It’s even harder to replace all the animal products you use (especially eggs and dairy for baking and flavouring) with vegan alternatives, and to find replacements for the ‘processed’ products (sauces, desserts, breads) that you buy because it takes time to make them from scratch.

So here’s what you do. At least, here is what I’m going to do, as I take the last small step to being vegan, all the way, all the time:

• Learn the list of 5 reasons for being vegan in the diagram above. Partly to remind myself, partly to answer the “why” question that others always ask. My approach is not to debate, not to defend, but to be ready if someone is really ready to listen.
• Get a button that says, simply, vegan, and wear it on days when I am going to food stores or restaurants.
• Use the Veganomicon cookbook for all my meals. This book is wonderful, unintimidating, practical, easy, delicious and funny.
• Keep a copy of Eating Animals to give to anyone who is ready and wants the facts.
• Be prepared for dinner invitations. Let the host of dinner parties know in advance that I’m vegan and that I’m serious about it. Know which restaurants in the area I’m going to be eating in, have vegan options. If I know I’m going to be eating at a place with no vegan options, eat in advance.
• I don’t have non-vegan family members living with me anymore; if I did, I’d tell them of my choice and that I’m serious about it, but that I will never impose it on others.
• Become sufficiently proficient at vegan cooking that I don’t need to fret when I’m cooking for or hosting non-vegans. Tell them in advance that all meals will be vegan, and what the vegan alternatives will be for milk/cream (for coffee, cereal), eggs and cheese. There are alternatives.

Not so hard after all.

photo of Pirahã tribeswoman from the New Yorker by Martin Schoeller

My recent meditations have focused on my frustrations with the limitations of language, and specifically:

• How competently and easily wild creatures seem to be able to communicate, and understand, with minimal use of vocalization.
• The cultural presumptions of what is true and what is important and how to think, be and do that seem to be embedded in our European languages, both the etymological origin of words and especially their modern connotations and Lakoffian framings, and even their syntax — they seem to be: about conveying facts rather than feelings, lacking in nuance, abstract rather than representative, conceptual rather than perceptual, constricting rather than expressive, prescriptive rather than descriptive, and analytical rather than narrative.
• The debate among linguists and others about the link between language, conception and cognition — can we conceive of things we cannot put into language, and does our language therefore restrict what and how we think and feel?
• Evidence that the neural patterns in our brains (that affect what and how we think) co-evolve with our learning and language development as young children (so “wild children” who are not taught language before adolescence become incapable of learning it, apparently because the way their brains have formed evolved to suit their non-verbal learning, so they are amazingly intuitive and perceptive, but ‘impaired’ at abstract conceptualization).
• The knowledge that art and music have been part of human culture at least twice as long as language, and speculation that vocalization/language first emerged not as a means of communication but as a means of creative self-expression, and was then adapted/coopted for communication and information transfer.
• The discovery of an Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, whose language is totally unrelated to other human languages, and which appears to be related to birdsong in its structure, and which lacks any ‘words’ for time, quantity, or the subjective and objective.
• The nonsense that some indigenous peoples were unable to ’see’ the ships of European invaders because their language had no words for such massive and destructive vessels.

I’ve been discussing this with Tree Bressen, Melanie Williams and Chris Corrigan, and doing a bit of online research on the subject. There is some compelling evidence that indigenous languages are significantly different in the worldview they represent from European languages, and that the language that we first learn affects and reinforces our worldview in a way that reflects the culture behind the language and which permeates and perhaps constrains the way which we henceforth think about everything. D’Arcy Rheault, in his book about Anishinaabe philosophy, writes:

Anishinaabe Mino-Bimaadiziwin [philosophy or way of living] does not objectify the world creating artificial divisions of subject and object.  It is difficult to understand this since we are constantly inundated with this subject/object dichotomy in the English language, but Anishinaabe [language] is not noun-based but verb-based with the subject and object already encoded in the verb; meaning it is action- and relationship-oriented rather than subject/object oriented….

[in explaining how a baby learns] We must be cognizant that [the baby's] apprehension of the outside world happens concurrently with the development of language for the baby.  A child that is raised in an environment with a language that differentiates between subjects and objects will thus develop these categories in her/his lived-apprehension of the world.  A child raised in an Anishinaabe environment will not develop these subject/object categories in the same way as western people perceive them since they do not exist in the same manner in Anishinaabe worldview.

This idea that language affects (and limits) what we can think and imagine is attributed to linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. In John Colapinto’s article on the Pirahã in the New Yorker, he explains:

Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, [linguist Peter] Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with quantities greater than that. “It’s language affecting thought,” Gordon told me. His paper, “Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia,” was enthusiastically taken up by a coterie of “neo-Whorfian” linguists around the world.

[Linguist Dan] Everett did not share this enthusiasm; in the ten years since he had introduced Gordon to the tribe, he had determined that the Pirahã have no fixed numbers. The word that he had long taken to mean “one” (hoi, on a falling tone) is used by the Pirahã to refer, more generally, to “a small size or amount,” and the word for “two” (hoi, on a rising tone) is often used to mean “a somewhat larger size or amount.” Everett says that his earlier confusion arose over what’s known as the translation fallacy: the conviction that a word in one language is identical to a word in another, simply because, in some instances, they overlap in meaning…

Everett concluded that the Pirahã’s lack of numerals was part of a larger constellation of “gaps.” Over the course of three weeks, Everett wrote what would become his Current Anthropology article, twenty-five thousand words in which he advanced a novel explanation for the many mysteries that had bedevilled him. Inspired by [linguist Edward] Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”

The late Dan Moonhawk Alford, a colleague of David Bohm and David Peat and a linguist who made a lifelong study of indigenous languages, explained the fundamental difference between indigenous and European languages (I can sense my friend Andrew Campbell smiling as he reads this):

Indigenous languages are the key to indigenous thought and worldview — and…they are as different from our European view of reality as quantum is from the classical view of reality. Recently Leroy Little Bear told the participants in the seventh Bohmian/Indigenous Science Dialogue that there is no Blackfoot language, or Navajo language, in the European sense of vocabularies and wordlists — instead, there are about 80 roots in Blackfoot [each of which stands for a kinesthetic prime of animate motion, as far as I can tell], which are combined and recombined on the fly to describe what-is as accurately as possible.

To help you understand this, take the word /Se?Se/ in Cheyenne, which by itself can mean ‘duck’ in English. But when you add /-novote/ to the end of it, meaning ‘goes down into a hole,’ you don’t have a logical connection of “duck goes down in hole” but rattlesnake! That’s because /Se?Se/ doesn’t really mean ‘duck’ at all — it means the combined dry scraping sound and zigzag motion both the duck and the rattlesnake make as they’re going away from you. It’s an event of animate motion which uniquely characterizes both the duck and the one that goes down in the hole that makes that same noise/movement.

This is a unique way of using human language — a kinesthetic base closer to Sign Language than to our more visual/verbal base. Amethyst First Rider has said on numerous occasions that when she says the simplest thing in English, like “The man is riding a horse,” she gets pictures coming up in her head. But when she says the equivalent thing in Blackfoot, no pictures come up in her head — only body feelings of movement!

I’m sure this is connected somehow to her other oft-made claim that no matter what it sounds like when it’s translated into English, when they’re speaking their own language they’re NOT using metaphor. Actually, this is true because the Indians are using categorization itself (like George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things as a lexical category in Dyrbal), while metaphor is a different kind of categorizing used extensively — some might say nearly exclusively — in Western European and other languages, and which they like to fancy is universal.

While all of us have been subtly conditioned/brainwashed/socialized by our European language/culture complex to believe in the “things” of reality as being more real than the invisible connections between them, valuing the dancers over the dancing, it’s a highly important antidote and counterbalance to know that Native American and other indigenous peoples value the dancing over the dancers, believe that processes and interrelationships are more real than the ‘things’ that grow out of them — that the physical is an epiphenomenon of the non-physical, and that cyclical timing is more real than linear time.

Moonhawk wades into the Whorf/Chomsky debate and the whole issue of the connection between language, culture and cognition in a set of pages online that Chris pointed me to. He moves beyond Whorf’s linguistic relativity to define what he calls “quantum linguistics” — analogous to (and Moonhawk says, Einstein’s inspiration for) the jump from Euclidean/Newtonian to relativistic quantum theory of matter. Citing Cheyenne teacher Sakej Youngblood Henderson he says:

Long ago, people and spirits and animals and plants all communicated the same way. Then something happened. Afterwards, we had to talk to each other in human speech. But we retained the Old Language for dreams, and for communicating with spirits and animals and plants.

Glenn Aparicio Parry, in his book based on the Bohmian Dialogues on meaning that involved several indigenous thinkers and linguists, wrote:

In the Blackfoot language, there are not nouns or verbs at all as we normally describe them in relation to each other. Instead, linguistic meaning is something similar to events emerging out of a fluid, constantly moving interconnected flux, rather than discrete interactions between subject and object. The Blackfoot worldview of synergistic, interconnected relationship is beyond the imagination of a Newtonian worldview, but much closer to a worldview of quantum entanglement or non-locality.

So where does all this get us? Some thoughts:

1. When we teach young children our European languages, are we doing them the terrible and irreversible disservice of imprisoning them in time, by neurologically encoding in their brains a concept of scarce, death-fearful linear “clock” time that will forever lock them out of the present, out of Now Time?
2. As intrigued as we might be by the idea (concept) of a language based on flow and relationship and not on “things”, are we adults, with our brains already fixed by the language/worldview we were brought up with, deluding ourselves to believe we can really imagine what that other language/worldview might be like? Is this like trying to understand a world with 13 dimensions (none of them temporal) made of strings that have no mass and only the probability of existence?
3. What can we learn of the commonality of indigenous and European language from the eight agreements of the multi-cultural Bohm Dialogues?:
   1. Everything that exists vibrates.
   2. Everything is in flux.
   3. The part enfolds the whole.
   4. There is an implicate (”folded-in, entangled with itself”) order to the universe.
   5. The ecosphere is basically friendly.
   6. Nature can be taught new tricks. “Reminds me of Alan Watts talking about how the universe has had to learn how to get ever smaller and ever larger as we probe it with microscopes and telescopes, receding ever further in the distance as self observes itself.”
   7. Quantum potential is spirit.
   8. Much of what exists is yes-yes both/and complementary.
4. If our modern language hobbles our ability to be part of, and appreciate, all-life-on-Earth, to be “the space through which stuff passes which we touch (as it passes) in hopefully useful ways” (with the “passing” and the “touching” being the essence of our living, not the “stuff” or the “we”) — then how can we set aside that language and its terrible conceptions, and learn to simply vibrate, “flux-tuate”, enfold, self-entangle, be-a-part, complement, self-spirit-ize, and in so doing use language as wild creatures (and to some extent indigenous human cultures, poets, musicians, artists and dreamers) do — to self-express our joy and discovery and curiosity, in useful and interesting ways, without obsessing about what Eliot called “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”?

Subject for an interesting “dialogue” (which means etymologically “a speaking across” and contrary to popular misconception has nothing to do with “two”), perhaps. What do you think?

“What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.”
– Jack Gilbert, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

my meditation place, in the forest beside my new home on Bowen Island

Tuesday is meditation day for me, and I have been thinking about something my meditation partner Melanie told me a couple of weeks ago. We had been discussing what we really care about, and it occurred to me as a result of our conversation that:

1. Most of what the media, politicians and other people who want to bring about change (or prevent change) are focused on is trying to affect our beliefs — what we think is true and what we thinks needs to be done.
2. For most of us, there is a vast “knowing-doing disconnect” — what we do and what we think/know we should do are very different.
3. The reason for this stems from Pollard’s Law: We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is simply no time in our artificially busy lives to do what we think is “merely” important. We watch TV, surf the net, chat with friends, and that important project gets perpetually put off. That’s human nature. We can’t be other than who we are.
4. What we “must” do, are the urgent things that get done because the pain or fear of not doing them exceeds the pain or fear of doing them. Most of those things are done “for” other people — bosses, loved ones, regulators. Much of this activity is coerced: We don’t want to get fired, we don’t want our loved ones to hate us, we don’t want to go to jail. But a few of the “must-do” things, and many of the “easy” and “fun” things we do, are not coercive. What determines which of these non-coercive things we elect to do? They’re things we care about. That course we’re taking. That show we never miss. The exercise or practice (e.g. blogging) we always find time for, no matter what, even though the sky won’t fall if it isn’t done.
5. In short, what drives what we do (voluntarily, after the stuff we believe we have no choice about) is not affected at all by what we believe. It is driven by what we care about.

So what? I think this is hugely important, because if we want to change what we do (or what others do), we should stop trying to change people’s minds, and instead try to change our/their hearts — what we/they care about. Of course, this is easier said than done. What we care about is not especially logical. Why do we care about some things more than others? Why do we not (hard as we try) really care about climate change, peak oil, and the impending economic collapse? I used to think it was because they were too abstract, too impersonal, or too far outside what we think we have any control over.

What we care about is visceral. It can drive us to kill someone who harms or threatens a loved one. It can drive us to suicide. It can make us love, or hate (ourselves or another) insensibly. Until we care enough about something, or someone, or ourselves, we will not do many of the things that we tell ourselves we want to do, hope to do, ought to do. And then when we care there is no stopping us.

What drives us to care about something, or someone? Maybe we have no control over it. Maybe our bodies, our genes, the land speaking to us, and the insidious and lifelong effect of our culture — what we are shown, what is reinforced or punished, combine to make us care, or not care. Certainly the chemistry of love is subconscious, irrational, and largely outside our control. There is, deep within us, a biophilia, a love for all-life-on-Earth that prevails beyond hope. The organisms that make us up also make us care about ourselves, our own preservation and well-being. All together, what makes us care is something that is within us, our raw selves.

Despite all the consumerist propaganda, I think we care about people, ourselves, all-life-on-Earth far more than we care about stuff. But maybe that’s just me. I intend to leave this life with nothing, and I recently managed to move across the country with all the ’stuff’ I cared about in two suitcases.

If what we care about is internal, intrinsic to ourselves, then how can we change what we, and others, care about? Is it even possible? When we fall in and out of love, when we experience or learn something that makes us love ourselves, or others, more or less, when we find the place we’re meant to live or the work we’re meant to do or one of those once-a-decade acquisitions that just works, what we care about changes. But mostly these events are accidental, and the best we can do is to open ourselves to them, and encourage others to do likewise.

I recently retired, and thanks mostly to good fortune rather than anything I did, or was born with, I now have a lot of choice in my life, and almost nothing that “has” to be done. I indicated that these choices are guided by three First Principles — generosity, valuing time, and living naturally. But in observing what I am actually doing, versus what I intended to do, I’ve come to realize that I’m trying unsuccessfully to flout Pollard’s Law. With fewer things that “must” be done, I am spending much of my time doing things that are easy and/or fun — various forms of play, and not much of the reconnecting, activism, and reflecting work I expected to be doing.

Since I’m not into material “stuff”, who and what I care about basically breaks down into three categories:

1. I care about myself (how I use my time, my health, happiness, learning, imagining/creativity, love, freedom, presence, integrity, ‘natural’ adaptability, ‘nobody-but-myself’ authenticity, and the beauty of my ‘place’).
2. I care about the inner and outer circles of my gravitational community (finding the people I’m meant to love and work with, and then being generous with them).
3. I care about all-life-on-Earth (being a part of Gaia, and reducing its suffering).

What I’m actually doing is all driven by these three categories of what I love. If I map that against the five categories of what I intended to do with my time once I’d retired (reconnecting, capacity-building, activism, model-creation, and taking time for personal joyful activities), it basically reiterates Pollard’s Law — Since there is no longer anything I “must” do, what I’m doing is what’s easy and what’s fun. I’m not practicing reconnecting, building capacities, involved in activism or new model-creation. I’m talking about these things because the ideation is easy and fun. Actually doing them is hard work. I’m not blogging (much), working on my film/novel, learning anything new, or accepting any new obligations, commitments, scheduled activities or responsibilities.

What I’m actually doing is: exploring my new home, spending time with those I love, talking about things that I find interesting, participating in live local entertainment, enjoying the passage of time and not having anything that “must” be done, and enjoying meeting new people and seeing if they might be people I could love. Lazy, easy, fun stuff. Those who know me tell me that I owe this to myself for awhile, but I’m not so sure I’ll ever get restless with this simple, easy life. I agree with John Gray that humans are (and have always been) preoccupied with the needs of the moment, and I’m delighted having no needs of the moment, so I can just do (or not do) what I want. Very selfish. Very human. Very natural.

I believe that we need to bring a quick end to industrial civilization, and specifically that we need to stop the Tar Sands and industrial agriculture. I believe we need new models, like the transition, permaculture, intentional community and unschooling movements, to help us cope with and replace dangerous and unsustainable systems. I believe we need to build personal and collective capacity to help us adapt to the inevitable catastrophes of the next generation, especially the collapse of the industrial economy, fossil fuel energy and ecological systems. But look at my behaviour, and it’s pretty clear I don’t, and won’t care enough about any of these things to act until I absolutely have to. What drives me right now is what (who) I really care about — the three categories in the list above.

That was what emerged from today’s meditation. I was striving to be present, in the moment. But instead, I found it easier and more fun thinking about why I’m not accomplishing what I had intended. And I’m not sure there’s a cure for that.

The Spring Peepers are back, and in full voice. Thousands of tiny frogs newly thawed from their winter hibernation, singing their hearts out for mates to carry on the species, as they have been doing in ponds like this one in Caledon for 200 million years (far longer than we humans have been around). The result is a cacophony of whistling sounds, delightful and life-affirming, the definitive sign of spring in these parts.

It is the last sound I will hear as a leave Caledon, once and for all, for my new home in Bowen Island BC. The sale of our house closes tomorrow, and my separation agreement is finally signed, so there is nothing to keep me here any longer. I once thought Caledon would be my home for life, the place I had been looking for all my life, my true home.

But as beautiful as it is, it is not where I, or any human, is really meant to live. The winters are too cold and too harsh, and the wild creatures who have the natural hardware for this climate must think us rather ridiculous, creating an artificial environment here just so we can survive in this inhospitable place. There is a reason that this area was so thinly settled with humans for the first million years of our existence on Earth — we’re meant for warmer climates, better suited to our thin coats, our feeble teeth and claws meant for foraging for fruits and vegetables, which don’t grow here naturally, our slow running pace, inadequate to catch prey or avoid predators without mechanical aids.

Beautiful, seductive land, Caledon, soon to be paved over as Toronto continues its inexorable growth to cover the entire south end of the province. For now, vibrant with wild life, who continue to live here as they have for eons. Soon they will all be gone, plowed under as sacrifice to human cultural homogeneity and inability to coexist or live within our means.

I have moved, someone recently pointed out to me, from a house too big for me on a hill beside a forest northwest of a major Canadian city (Toronto) to a house too big for me on a hill beside a forest northwest of a major Canadian city (Vancouver). Maybe I’m incapable of learning. But it seems like a move in the right direction.

Farewell Caledon. I won’t miss your growing human hordes, but I will always remember your wild places and wild creatures, who taught me what it is to be part of all-life-on-Earth, and hence how to be human. Thank you for that, and may Gaia protect you as best she can. I will think of you.

In a recent tweet, Jerry Michalski asks:

Is the www really connecting us? or just creating thin, artificial relationships?

To which I replied:

What is the ’stuff’ of relationship anyway, and have we forgotten what it means, in the growing dearth of authentically shared experience?

Twitter is a great place for posting interesting rhetorical questions, but I thought these questions merited a blog post.

Let me start with Jerry’s questions. In a recent post, I posited that the number of relationships you can sustain at one time varies from 2 to perhaps 150, depending on their depth, since we only have a finite amount of time to invest in relationships. I hypothesized that one could develop a ‘quantum’ model of relationships that would depict them from inner to outer circles in decreasing level of intensity, with an outward shift making room for a closer one elsewhere in your community of relationships, and an inward shift forcing you to move other relationships to the periphery or even out of your orbit entirely.

Jerry’s question suggests the risk that online relationships, which are easy to establish and jettison, are mostly the ‘outside ring’ type, thin and somewhat artificial. Yet most of us have seen some such relationships blossom into close friendships and romances, not to mention powerful work colleagues, suppliers, customers, employers, publishers, and artistic, scientific or philosophical collaborators. What does it take for ‘gravity’ to kick in and add weight and depth to a casual relationship, online or face-to-face?

Looking at my own relationships, I would say the main gravitational forces are need and passion. What defines relationship most, however, is reciprocity. A one-way need or passion is pretty sad, but one that is reciprocal is powerful, what I have called (to use another term from molecular chemistry) covalent (literally ’sharing or exchanging capacity’). This is the stuff of relationship — sharing or exchanging (knowledge, ideas, experiences, perspectives, and/or love, through conversation, in the broader sense of ‘turning together with’ another person).

How deeply can we share or exchange with ‘online’ relationships, where it is difficult to appreciate the other person’s context, needs and passions, and when there is usually not enough time or attention to nurture the relationship to move it to the inner circles — the circles of intimacy at which relationships really bubble, sizzle and soar. But there are exceptions. I have fallen in love online (in Second Life). I have developed online friendships so close that when we first, finally, met face to face we immediately embraced and talked for hours as if we had known each other a lifetime. I have been so sparked — intellectually, emotionally, or otherwise — by the ideas or rhetoric or creativity or knowledge or articulateness of some people that I first encountered online that I have aggressively pursued them to the point they are now good friends, lovers, intimates, and some of these relationships have lasted and others faded, largely based on reciprocity and whether the spark was sustainable.

What drove me to move these relationships to a more intimate level was a sense that, without close and frequent connection and an acknowledgement of reciprocal interest (need or passion), these relationships were really imagined, fantasies, exaggerated by my anticipation and imagination of their possibilities. I wanted to authenticate these relationships.

As I’ve mentioned before, relationships are complex phenomena, not predictable nor controllable. They are a form of dance, or play (in both sense of the word), that is largely unstructured, with the moves and ‘plot’ of the relationships co-developed by the players.

What do you think? Are we fooling ourselves into believing our 150 ‘relationships’ online are more valuable, reciprocal, and authentic than they really are? Are we imagining them to be what we want them to be because it’s easier than actually negotiating a ‘real’ relationship? And are we settling for large numbers of superficial relationships at the cost of true, dizzying, powerful, deep, intimate, authentic relationships, the kind that fill us with love, with intention, with meaning for our lives?

Photo “love and friendship’ by Nesis Elisheva from artmajeur.com

photo by Maren Yumi

A couple of years ago, riffing off Nancy White, I wrote that

Life’s meaning, and an understanding of what needs to be done, emerges, most often, from conversation in community with people you love. It is the key to changing anything, whether it be the political or economic system, or yourself, or whether you want to save the whales, stop global warming, reform education, spark innovation or change anything else.

Now (thanks to Tree and my colleagues at Art of Hosting for the link) a new study suggests that when we have deep, meaningful conversations with others, we are happier people. The authors of the study say the result was counter-intuitive (”don’t worry, be happy” and “I don’t want to know”) but it really doesn’t surprise me. We are programmed to look for explanations and solutions for things we don’t understand and don’t like. Initially we may want to try to control the situation, rush to conclusions and solutions, but when those prove elusive, and the knowledge, ideas, perspectives and insights we have acquired don’t help us cope, we quickly turn to conversation. Why? I think there are ten reasons that conversations are so valuable they drive almost everything we believe, understand, and do:

1. It’s better to know. Maybe we say and feel that we don’t want to know how bad it is, but when we say that we’re already imagining the worst. The truth is usually not that bad, and that truth often emerges from conversation.
2. We like reassurance that what we feel and think makes sense. The fastest way to get that reassurance is to converse, to share, because from conversation come the nods of understanding, the appreciation, the sympathetic ideas, and the empathy that make what we feel and think more bearable, more sensible.
3. It’s how we learn. We learn best by doing, by watching others, and by asking questions, and all three processes are improved through intelligent conversation. Tell me, how/why did you do that? Show me again and this time talk me through it. Now let me try, and tell me how I’m doing at each step.
4. It’s how we decide. The best decisions are informed by ‘the wisdom of crowds’, by consultation, by talking through the options, by consensus.
5. It’s how we resolve conflict. Conversation is how we ‘talk out’ our differences. When we discuss our respective viewpoints respectfully and openly, an appreciation of the other person’s feelings, beliefs and rationale can emerge, and the misunderstanding that usually underlies the conflict can be dissipated.
6. It leads to intention, and hence to action. Often an event or learning will lead us to a sense of urgency to act, but not give us wisdom of what action to take. Conversation, once it has reassured us that our instinct to act is valid, can help us surface and learn some of the options to act, and hence propel us into action. And when we converse, we often state our commitment, our intention to act, and having a witness to that intention can also push us to act on it.
7. It clarifies, in our own minds, what we care about and hence who we are. What we care about defines who we are, so when we have a conversation that helps us understand whether and to what degree we care about an issue, and why, we come to understand and know ourselves better. That makes us more useful in many ways, and in the process, probably makes us happier.
8. With practice, it improves our social fluency, and other critical capacities and competencies. The chart below is one I co-developed with Chris Lott, and the blue circle which, in concert with our knowledge and thinking competencies enables us to be usefully expressive (artistic and improvisational, and hence socially fluent) is all about the capacity for and practice of conversation.
9. With practice, it teaches us the critical appreciative skills of listening and attention. Every conversation is a dance, and you have to be pretty insensitive not to realize that if you always lead and dominate the conversation, soon people won’t want to dance with you any more. And of course we learn more when we pay attention, really listen to what others are saying.
10. It opens us to new possibilities. Although often in conversation we are seeking reassurance, attention and appreciation, sometimes we will be surprised, bowled over, astonished, to hear something, or to realize something, that changes us radically, opens us to new ideas and worldviews, breaks our heart. That is the key to innovation and resilience, and good conversation can expose us and keep us open to these mind-altering, heart-breaking new possibilities.

Yes, I know, lately I’ve been down on language because while it’s a passable tool for intellectual understanding it’s a poor one for communicating emotion. But I’m not sure you even need language to have a deep and meaningful conversation. Watch lovers converse with the ‘illiterate’ sounds and tones of their voices, watch the body language in meetings and casual encounters, watch wild animals collaborate on a project they couldn’t do alone — each is a wordless conversation. Even the conversation we have with ourselves (and imagine ourselves having with the author) when we read something stimulating is a substantially illiterate conversation — it’s more about acknowledging what we feel, and tapping into our instincts, than it is an intellectual word-conversation.

These ten ‘values’ of conversation make us more competent, more human, more appreciative, more collaborative.

No wonder conversation makes us happy.