Not gone, but apparently forgotten

Covid entered our house again this week, this time taking down my husband and my daughter. For now the 15yo and I seem to have escaped this round, but it’s early days yet. Based on the incubation period and when my husband tested positive, we could still succumb.

Fortunately we’re all as vaccinated as we can be, and while they were pretty sick for a couple of days, covid doesn’t seem to have hit too hard. The trouble is, there’s always the possibility of long covid. Or any one of the myriad other “side effects” of the virus that can hit in the years to come. Increased risks of Parkinson’s disease, Diabetes, and heart disease are just some of the ones we already know about, and these risks all seem to be independent of the severity of the initial infection.

Here in Australia there is a new covid wave rising. Hospitalisations (our only even remotely reliable measure now) are rising, though as data is only reported weekly, we don’t know how sharply yet.

I’m at high risk for many reasons, the one that scares me the most is that I’ve already got long covid. I’m getting better, but I am terrified of what another infection will do. Long covid can completely destroy your quality of life.

What really worries me, though, is that we don’t know who’s at risk. Anyone can get long covid. Anyone can suffer heart disease as a result of covid. Anyone can wind up with Parkinson’s. We don’t know what the risk factors are. We still don’t really know what this virus does, or how it does it. And it’s not going away.

Which is why I find it utterly bewildering that governments around Australia have removed all of the public health measures that might shrink the wave. On Thursday the Queensland Health Department tweeted that the best things we could do to avoid covid were to sanitise and maintain social distancing of 1.5 metres indoors. I can’t remember what the third thing was, and I can’t check, because the tweet was deleted after Professor Brendan Crabb from the Burnett Institute politely and eloquently shredded them.

It’s outrageous to me that a government department of health should be spouting nonsense that was firmly debunked literally years ago. We know that covid is airborne. It can hang in the air for hours after the infected person has left. Social distancing is useless if you are in a poorly ventilated space. Sanitising is irrelevant to the spread of covid. We know that the things that work against the spread of airborne diseases are better ventilation, HEPA filtration, masking, and avoiding indoor crowds. Incidentally the flu is also airborne, so these measures would help protect us from that, too. Yet few people know this, and even fewer seem to care.

No-one is required to mask anywhere except in hospitals and other healthcare settings. Not on public transport. Not in shops. Not in cinemas or theatres. Vulnerable people are told to just stay home, yet I cannot stress enough that WE DO NOT KNOW WHO IS VULNERABLE TO THIS DISEASE.

Of course telling vulnerable people to just stay home, even if we know exactly who they are, is an appalling violation of human rights and basic decency. Just isolate indefinitely. Forget having a life. Forget being able to be a part of your community. If you want to be safe, just become a hermit. We don’t care about your wellbeing, we just don’t want to have to wear a mask, or install better ventilation, or organise our events to be properly covid safe. (Or risk losing an election by forcing everyone to do that.)

Next weekend there’s an event I’d have loved to be able to attend, but it’s at a bar, in a small, poorly ventilated space. It will be overcrowded, and we’ll have to shout to be heard, which means everyone will be breathing hard and no one will be masked. It’s ideal conditions for a superspreader event. And this is normal. Because we’re back to normal. Living our lives. Not being afraid.

Yet if you’re not afraid of covid, you really haven’t been paying attention.

A little bit of perspective

One of the things that happens to me if I don’t have enough social contact and things going on is that I lose perspective in a startlingly big way.

Small fights become huge.

Minor incidents get picked over, magnified, and blown out of all proportion.

Tiny frets that I would normally shrug off take root in my brain and grow, strengthen, and multiply until they are all consuming.

I oscillate between “I am the worst parent in the world and I am going to ruin my children’s lives” and “I am so proud of my children I could literally, absolutely, honestly burst. Any moment now.”

This year, lockdown or no lockdown, was always going to do that to me. The covid constraints of being socially distant and reducing contact with the outside world are almost unmanageable for a sociavore like me who thrives on immense amounts of human contact. Lockdown has absolutely made it worse, but just having to work from home more or less indefinitely is pretty damned challenging for me.

“Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are…well… human beings.” Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms.

The reason I recognise these symptoms is because I had them in my early 20s when I was home a lot with chronic fatigue syndrome. I lost perspective, went quietly loopy, and obsessed over everything.

Apparently retirees do this a lot, too. When they stop going to work for the first time, if they don’t replace work with something equally stimulating, they become the bane of committees everywhere, as they keep meetings going for hours over tiny details, and contact the manager over every little thing.

It certainly happened with my parents. They spent months completely immersed in a fight with the council over the number of parking permits they got (even though they had a garage and only one car). Over a matter of cm on a boundary marker with a neighbour. Over a fence. Over the trees in the street. Over everything.

If I ever retire, this will absolutely be me. And, to be honest, it is me now. My fuse is shorter than a pygmy possum. My perspective is as distorted as the mirrors in the funhouse at Luna Park. I am picking over old grievances, obsessing over ancient embarrassments, and examining my friendships under the microscope to see if they are unsound. I am losing it, my friends.

Because I know the signs, I am reaching out as much as I can, but as long as working from home is the norm, it will be a constant battle. On the bright side, knowing it makes it more manageable. On the downside, there’s no vaccine imminent, so we may be in this for the long haul.

Frying pan of enlightenment: a frying pan with a yellow lightbulb in the centre

I am not telling you this so that you can point and laugh, although if it makes you feel better, go right ahead. We have to take our pleasures where we find them these days. But I suspect I am not alone. I suspect that 2020 is a uniquely challenging time for everyone’s sense of perspective.

Which is why we all need to grab those people who fearlessly wield the frying pan of enlightenment and clutch them (virtually) close. Because it is really hard to recognise your own irrationality, but it’s often super obvious in someone else.

We’ll get through this. It is temporary. But we all need to hold each other up and breathe deeply just to keep going. So don’t berate yourself if your reactions seem over the top these days. Reach out, instead.

When life hits back

On Friday morning I was excited to be heading to Geelong for a workshop on Diversity in Computing, as part of the Australasian Computing in Education Conference. I have dear friends in the Computing Education Research field, so stealing away from work to brainstorm how to increase awareness of, and interest in, Computer Science was great in itself – especially because I had huge respect for the stars running the workshop – but I was also going to catch up with friends. I was all set for a great day.

I’m not a fan of driving, for the most part. It’s a necessary evil, it seems to me, but since we got a hybrid driving has been much more fun, so I wasn’t even worried about the relatively tedious drive down the Geelong road. But as I cruised over the Westgate, having left early to make sure I beat the peak hour traffic, I suddenly realised that this was my first trip to Geelong since the day my Dad died, over four years ago.

God knows my dad and I had a complex relationship. By the time he died I would go so far as to say it was quite dysfunctional. His death was mingled relief and pain: relief that he was no longer suffering (his long deterioration from cancer had already been traumatic for years), pain that so much went unsaid. The day he died was pure shock.

My sister and I picked Mum up from Ocean Grove, where they had been when he died. He had gone for a walk and died in the street. Mum, who doesn’t drive, was stranded. So we gathered ourselves together, faced the practicalities, and raced towards her, where she sat comforted by a generous and kindly neighbour. I remember Tina Arena, Songs of Love and Loss, coincidentally on the car stereo as we drove down. I remember stopping for coffee at a really odd little drive-through coffee booth near Geelong station. I had chai tea, thinking I had had enough caffeine that day. I remember tears. Worries about the future, especially Mum’s future, and shock. So much shock. I don’t really remember much about arriving at Ocean Grove. I’m pretty sure we didn’t stay long, although I had packed an overnight bag just in case. In truth “packed” suggests a level of thought and planning that wasn’t possible. I had thrown some things into a bag that may or may not have been adequate.

I haven’t been to Ocean Grove since that day. I haven’t even been through Geelong. And even though much has changed – Geelong seems to have grown up somewhat, it is shinier, and more glamorous than I remembered – being there was a shock that I was completely unprepared for.

The morning was fine. I was catching up with friends, talking about work, brainstorming projects. A dear friend who, it turns out, believes in revenge gifting, gave me two very fine bottles of wine to take home with me. I was planning lunch with other friends, before a really great workshop.

But after lunch I felt ill. I thought maybe I had been glutened, but it was different somehow. I went to the workshop and halfway through felt an unbearable urge to burst into tears. For a moment there I was lost. I messaged a friend, scraped myself together, and it was ok.

But it was weird. I haven’t cried for my dad in years. In many ways the trauma of his passing was eclipsed by the trauma of the year before his death, which was truly horrendous. I cried for him. I miss him. But in many ways I miss the father I wished he could have been, rather than the father he actually was.

After the workshop I dropped two friends at the station, and in the middle of light and happy conversation we drove past that coffee place. By this time I was wise to what my confused brain was doing to me, so I was ok. But it was still a shock.

I was in the present, but I was unexpectedly back in that dreadful day at the same time. It’s probably just as well my car didn’t choose to play me any Tina Arena on the way home, or I’d likely have had to pull over and cry. I’m crying now.

Grief has a way of leaping out at you at unexpected moments. I try to be kind to myself when it happens, but the middle of a workshop isn’t really the right time. Sometimes it’s necessary to suck it up, and then write about it the next day with a divine glass of wine, as a form of therapy.

These are scary times. The scariest I can remember. But life goes on. And sometimes it gives you an unexpected beating. But there are workshops, passionate and dedicated people, and good friends with divine wine. There are people to hold you when you fall, and people who will come looking for you if you fall silent. There is hope all around, even when grief seems to be taking you down.

Some days life pushes us over, but we always have the option of pushing back. Push back. Hug your friends. And be kind to yourselves.

 

***this has been posted unedited, not even proof read, as a stream of consciousness grief reaction. It is as real as it can be. I hope it speaks to you. It helped me. You helped me, by being along for the ride.

Stranger Danger Danger

“Mummy, why did you talk to that lady? She’s a stranger.”

The question nailed me to my chair. I had been idly chatting with a fellow passenger in an airport, and my daughter found it difficult to reconcile this with what she has been told (not by us!) – “Never talk to strangers!”

I always talk to strangers. I smile at people. I strike up conversations. And I have made personal, professional, and profound connections this way. When I was 15 I started writing to a complete stranger in Germany, and we just spent a week visiting him and his family, absolutely enveloped in love.

Some of my best friends now are people I just started talking to at random. In fact, if you think about it, everyone is a stranger at first. When you first start school. When you start a new job. When you move into a new neighbourhood. If you followed the “don’t talk to strangers” rule, it would be an extraordinarily isolated and lonely life.

But this is what we are supposed to be teaching our kids. That strangers are dangerous. That you should never talk to strangers. That strangers are scary.

Although the official messages, such as those you find on kid safety websites, have mostly shifted to identifying troublesome behaviours (such as asking kids to keep a secret from their parents) rather than avoiding strangers, apparently my 9 year old still knows that you don’t talk to strangers.

And where has this led us? This has led us to lifts where we rigidly face the front and don’t make eye contact. This has led us to neighbours who remain strangers to each other forever. This has led us to a distressing, and indeed hugely damaging, lack of community.

“Make sure that you are the kind of person who is positively contributing to your neighbourhood. Smile at everyone. Don’t ever stand at the bus stop with a stranger and not say ‘looks like rain’ or ‘why is the bus late?'” Hugh Mackay, DumboFeather Podcast, July 2016.

It’s true: Strangers can be dangerous. So can family. So can friends. But we would never teach our kids – or ourselves – to avoid family and friends. We are social creatures who need community in a very visceral way. And by teaching our children to fear the world, to believe that anyone they don’t know is dangerous to them, we are harming them profoundly.

We should be nurturing our kids’ ability to form connections, and to build networks. These are the skills that will keep them safe and make them fulfilled and productive adults. These are the skills that can even save our world and enable people to work together to solve our greatest problems. Yet we are actively teaching kids to repress their instinctive urge to talk to people, on the tiny chance that those people turn out to be dangerous.

I married a man who was once a stranger (very strange indeed). Strangers are just people we haven’t met yet. Some of them will hurt us. Some of them will love us. Some of them will save our lives. By closing ourselves off to strangers – building walls, not making eye contact, and preventing ourselves from connecting – we are killing ourselves emotionally.

Talking to strangers can, indeed, be dangerous. But not half as dangerous as never letting them in.

 

Lonely in a crowd

Locals have left tributes for murdered West Heidelberg toddler Sanaya. There are outpourings of grief and rage, and messages to Sanaya from people she never met. While I understand how crisis brings people together, and sometimes it takes a shock to draw attention, it saddens me that Sanaya’s mum, now accused of also being her murderer, was described in the media today as having 1000 Facebook friends, but no-one in Melbourne she could really talk to.

It feels to me as though we are very good, these days, at signing petitions, attending vigils, and leaving offerings at the scene of crimes. But we’re not so great at drawing isolated people into our community.

We drive to and from huge, impersonal shopping centres without seeing a familiar face. We drive to and from work. We don’t know our neighbours. All too frequently we don’t even socialise with our work colleagues. We’re too busy to put down roots, to know our community, and to see the loneliness on the faces around us – in fact we’re often too busy to see the faces at all.

And some of those faces are struggling. Lonely, isolated, or even trapped in abusive relationships, we give them total privacy, when what they need is a hand stretched out.

My students will tell you I’m not a fan of the Facebook attitude to privacy, but sometimes I wonder if it would be better if Mark Zuckerberg was right and privacy really was dead. I think we venerate it too much. I think we are so concerned with each other’s privacy that we sometimes fail to reach out.

We build fences, create higher walls, and plant screening hedges so that no-one can breach our defences, but maybe it’s our defences that are killing us.

I’m really lucky. I have an incredible collection of friends. We catch up with each other, but frequently need to schedule catch ups weeks or months in advance, because life is so busy. Just dropping in is a luxury we can’t afford – often because we don’t live close to each other. Community is no longer the people around you. That means we can choose our friends, and it’s easier to stay connected with the people we love even when they live on another continent. But it also means that the people we walk past every day are often not people we connect with.

It means when you’re having a rougher day than usual the people around you won’t necessarily notice or care. And it means that when you’re like Sanaya’s mum – struggling and lonely – there may be no-one around you who will smile and reach out a hand. It turns out that we were great at giving her privacy, but not so great at giving her community.

I worry about our future. Online communities can be wonderful, but they don’t see you walking past. I get a lot of support from my Facebook friends, but they can’t pick me up if I fall down in the street. If I couldn’t post for some reason, I doubt my Facebook presence would be missed for quite some time. Reaching out, whether on Facebook or on the phone, is really hard when you are feeling raw and vulnerable. Sometimes you need the people around you to notice.

Of course, it’s not easy to reach out to total strangers, and I don’t know what Sanaya’s mum’s story is. Maybe people did reach out. But I do know that I don’t reach out enough to the people in my own life. There are so many small ways we can keep each other from falling, and I think I could do more.

To check in with friends at work who have been absent for a while, to see if they’re ok. To stop when I see someone is upset, and ask if there’s anything I can do. To arrange more coffees. To send more emails – or better yet, make more phone calls. To really listen when I ask someone how they are, and not just take a quiet “ok” for an answer. To put a flower, a chocolate frog, or a cup of coffee on a friend’s desk when they’re struggling. To take the time to be really appreciative when someone does something nice. Even to admire a new haircut. Just to connect.

Sometimes we all fall through the cracks. Some land harder than others. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all do a little more catching?

 

Stop Violence against who?

I’ve always been a bit uneasy about the slogan “stop violence against women”. Not because I disagree with the sentiment, but because I think it leaves a huge hole in the issue we need to tackle.

We certainly do need to stop violence against women. And against children. But also against men. And animals. Recent reports of native wildlife being shot with arrows, and wombats being deliberately run over in a NSW campground are horrific. Who does this sort of thing for fun?? Someone who sees violence as entertainment!?

What we have is a society that sees violence as a solution. That manages crowds of refugees with tear gas and water cannons. That deals with a bloody revolution by bombing civilians.

That deals with frightened, desperate people by stripping them of their human rights, exposing children to horrific abuse, and putting their lives at risk so as to appear “tough on border control”. Which, by the way, wins votes for the perpetrators.

We live in a society where violence is perceived as a solution to many things. Where a drug problem becomes a war, instead of a health problem that can be managed. Where our collective instinct, when threatened, is to lash out, notwithstanding the simple truth that violence begets violence, and that wars create wars.

So yes, let’s stop violence against women. There’s no question there’s far too much of it. But let’s also give everything we’ve got to build a society where violence isn’t the answer. Where communities are built and connections made. Where unhappy people can reach out for support, and the foundations of our society are the connections between us, not the walls we build around ourselves.

I know I’m a little naive. I’m not suggesting that the answer to Daesh is a group hug. I don’t know that there is an answer, although something clearly needs to be done. But I’m pretty sure that bombing them isn’t going to make them turn around and say “Sorry, you were right. We’ll just leave our weapons in a pile over here and become nice peaceful citizens. Sorry to trouble you.” More likely is that they will ensure, as far as they can, that civilians die in their place, and the west gets blamed.

I don’t hit my kids. But sometimes I do lose it and shout at them in a pretty aggressive way. And I know that when I do that it’s because I have failed to find a constructive way through whatever situation we are in. When I lose control of my temper it means I have failed to find a workable solution. And I always, always regret it.

Asimov once wrote that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. To be fair, he had a character say that, and we probably can’t accuse him of believing everything any of his characters ever said. But it’s a compelling line. Violence isn’t a solution. It’s a failure.

Maybe I’m looking for more change than we can manage from where we’re starting, but it would be nice to see it at least part of the conversation. Stop violence against women, definitely. But let’s see if we can’t make violence itself unacceptable.

PS It’s been suggested to me by someone I respect greatly that I may be distracting from the effectiveness of the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign, and that stopping violence altogether is too hard. We have to tackle it piece by piece. But the more I think about it the more I think that it’s not going to work. Malcolm Turnbull today said “Real men don’t hit women.” With the very clear implication that real men can hit men and that’s ok. And that’s wrong on so many levels. Women are weak and can’t take it (rubbish). Men are strong and can take it (rubbish). We are all weak and strong in our own ways, but no-one should ever have to take it. Violence is wrong, and we can make it wholly unacceptable, not just against women but against anyone. We shouldn’t do a clothing check, or a DNA test, before we decide whether we can hit someone or not! That kind of attitude makes it ok to hit a transgender woman (“because she’s really a man”), or a homosexual man (“not a woman but not my sort of a man”). It relies on stereotypes that we should all be trying to leave behind. Of men protecting women. Of women needing protection. Of men not needing protection.  Support the Stop Violence Against Women Campaign – it’s important. But work towards stopping violence, full stop. Real men, real women… real people don’t hit.

Where’s your village?

“Year 12 farewell assembly. The tradition is they walk up the middle stairs while staff form a kind of honour guard. One student was hanging back and I wasn’t sure why. Then his friend arrived who has a knee injury and can’t handle stairs. He was waiting for her, and he piggy backed her all the way up. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my school!”

On average my facebook posts probably gather 5 likes each. Even the cute pictures of sugar gliders get maybe 10 or so likes. But this post, by the end of a single day, had 44 likes. This story resonates. People go “awww! That’s beautiful!” There is something about people looking out for each other, going a little further to help each other out, and quietly being there for each other, that speaks directly to our hearts.

Do you know why? I think it’s because we know it’s missing from our lives most of the time. In general we live incredibly isolated lives. It’s not that we don’t have friends – most of us do. But we don’t see them every day. We don’t necessarily notice if we don’t speak to them for a few weeks running.  Huge upheavals can happen in their lives without us ever knowing, even though we love them very much.

I don’t believe we do any less, care any less, or love any less. We have friends, we have work, we have busy, busy lives. But what we really don’t have, most of us, is community. Many of my closest friends live 10, 20, or even thousands of kilometers away. We are pretty good at keeping in touch. We call. We email. We facebook. But we don’t live next door. We don’t always notice the pauses in the conversation that might mean something has gone badly wrong, because we are all so busy that pauses happen all the time. Packed into those pauses might be the death of a parent, an episode of depression, even an ambulance trip to the emergency room, and we might never even know.

If you ever find yourself stuck in the middle of the sea
I’ll sail the world to find you
If you ever find yourself lost in the dark and you can’t see
I’ll be the light to guide you

Find out what we’re made of
When we are called to help our friends in need
You can count on me like 1, 2, 3
I’ll be there
And I know when I need it
I can count on you like 4, 3, 2
You’ll be there
‘Cause that’s what friends are supposed to do, oh yeah

Count on me – Bruno Mars.

We don’t know our neighbours beyond a cordial chat when we happen to be getting into our cars at the same time. We certainly don’t drop by to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. We don’t walk to school and get to know all the families on the way. We don’t shop at the local shops and know the shopkeepers’ children. We live in huge cities and commute from one side to the other for work. We shop at massive shopping centers surrounded by strangers.

George Monbiot argues that this is killing us. In our busy striving for individualism and wealth, we are losing contact with the very things that bring us the deepest satisfaction and contentment. I’m really lucky, I find many of these things at my school, with both staff and students. There is a sense of community there, beautifully exemplified by the piggy back, that fills a vast hole in my life. I can’t imagine leaving, and it breaks my heart a little each time we say goodbye to the next crop of year 12s.

But not everyone can work or study at my school. Not everyone will find their community in their workplace. And whoever we are, however introverted, however independent, we need community. We need that sense of people looking out for us, and that meaning and fulfillment that comes from looking out for others.

I think what we’ve failed to recognise is that friends are not the same as community. Community is, of necessity, a local thing. If you start to feel depressed and can’t bring yourself to call anyone, people who see you every day might notice and have the chance to help. But if your friends are all remote, they’re not likely to notice until the time between phone calls becomes obvious, which could be weeks, or even months. If you break your leg, have a sick child, or a sick parent, and you don’t call for help, community has the chance to notice because of the change in your routine.

The problem is that our cities are built in ways that actively discourage community. Our houses are getting bigger and our fences higher. Our local shopping strips are dying, to be replaced by huge, impersonal shopping centers miles away that we have to drive to. Our public transport, which at least allows us to walk through our neighbourhood on the way to and from our very remote jobs, is slow, erratic, and expensive. Everything about our town planning encourages us out of our neighbourhoods, into our cars, and away from any potential community we might otherwise build.

And the trouble is I think it takes a community to fix it.

The new normal

Here in Melbourne, Spring has suddenly sprung. Truly it has – don’t bother me with your petty calendar-based technicalities, I know Spring when I bask in it.

Outside the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and the temperature has reached that balmy level where, if it were summer, we’d all be muttering about brass monkeys and their frozen … er… seed cases (this is a family friendly website, ok?). Truly, it’s 17 degrees out there and we’re breaking out the t-shirts, shorts, and thongs, making plans to head for the beach. Weather like this in January would have us reaching for our coats and beanies. But coming as it does after a grey, cold winter, 17 degrees is pure, unadulterated bliss.

We are a remarkably adaptable species. We adjust quite quickly to new circumstances, and sometimes we forget that anything has even changed. What’s normal today is entirely dependent on what happened yesterday. Was it 12 degrees and rainy? Then 17 degrees is fine. But sometimes it pays to examine the new normal, and wonder if we have actually progressed. So here is a random list of normalities that could use some adjusting.

1. Politicians lie. They do. It’s a fact. We’re so used to it that it’s not even newsworthy anymore. It’s just a thing we know they do. I don’t know what the point of elections is anymore. We vote for some party on the basis of promises that we know they will break. We accept the lies, the inhumanity, and the gross inequity of their actions. Perfectly intelligent people swallow all kinds of lies like “saving lives by stopping the boats” and “budget emergencies”, even when evidence has shown them to be complete rubbish. And we are neither surprised nor horrified when they turn out to be corrupt. It’s just the way they are.

But we don’t have to accept it. We don’t have to vote for politicians. We can vote for independents, and minor parties. The major parties would have you believe that it leads to chaos, but Julia Gillard steered a hung parliament and a very fragile senate through some of the most significant progress Australia has seen in years. We got a National Disability Insurance Scheme, we got a price on carbon – a step that much of the world is now implementing, while watching in horror as we dismantle ours. The worst thing that can happen to a government is to have complete control. Good government is a process of negotiation, balance, and compromise.The more independents and minor parties get the vote, the more politicians will take note and start to listen to us. Your local member broke a promise? Sack ’em. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

2. We need new stuff. It’s hard rubbish time in my area, and the number of large, fully functional televisions that have been thrown out because their owners have shiny new flat screen tvs is ASTOUNDING. All because we need new stuff. We picked up a coffee table that needs a couple of nails and a polish to be as good as new. It’s a sturdy, high quality table. It’s lovely. But it was chucked on the scrap heap, because we need new stuff. More with the shiny things. Newsflash: We don’t need new stuff. Things can be repaired. Things can be polished. I can imagine a whole new class of profession in the future: people who fix stuff. Freaky, eh?

3. There’s rubbish everywhere. Yes, there is. But like politicians, we don’t have to accept that. We can take responsibility for our own rubbish. We can create less rubbish (don’t get me started on coffee pods), and dispose of what we do create carefully. We can pick up a little of everyone else’s rubbish every now and then. How many times have you walked into a school, a shopping centre, or a carpark and thought “how disgusting, people are such pigs!” and yet not done anything about it? Be the change you want to see in the world.

4. We need cars. We don’t, you know. We have feet. We have bicycles. We have public transport. Sure, there are arguments against many of those things, but you have more power in your body than you give it credit for. You can walk further than you think you can. You can ride further than you think you can. And the beautiful part is that the more you do it, the more you can do it. Got kids to transport? Get yourself a cargo bike. Cheaper than a second car, and you’ll save yourself the cost of a gym membership too. I’m not saying cars aren’t useful, but does your family really need two?

5. Productive=Busy. We are greatly invested in being busy these days. Wasted time is anathema. Got to be up and doing! But if there is one single thing I have learnt from being ill for a long time, it is that sometimes the most productive thing we can do is nothing at all. Mindfulness, stillness, peace and quiet – whatever you call it, we all need it, and we don’t value it nearly enough. I recharge my phone with ferocious obsessiveness, rarely letting it get flat. But I let myself get flat all the time. When was the last time you prioritized recharging yourself?

6. We mustn’t interfere. I have friends who live on a beautiful beach in Tasmania, where signs say dogs aren’t allowed, as it is a significant nesting area for a number of threatened species. Nonetheless, dog owners take their dogs there regularly, even off the lead. Rather than tut-tutting under their breath, my friends call them on it. Gently. Tactfully. But ever so firmly. They’re clever about it. They give people a chance to save face with comments like “Did you realize that dogs aren’t allowed on this beach?” which gives the owners the chance to say “Oooh, no, thanks for letting me know” and scuttle away with their tails between their legs (sorry). They still see dogs on that beach, but there are less of them, and they rarely see anyone they’ve spoken to coming back. This is how progress is made.

The mum next door screams at her kids a lot? Strike up a conversation. Maybe she really needs someone to talk to. There’s a dad in the supermarket with his toddler on the floor, screaming up a storm? Reach out to him. “Hah, I’ve had days I’d have liked to do that!” or “we’ve all been there, eh?” to let him know he’s not alone. When I was away from work for an extended period, I got lots of messages, emails, texts and phone calls, just checking that I was ok. I even got a few visits.

The world needs more reaching out, not less. So often we have no idea what’s going on, even next door to us.

What’s normal to you, and how much of it needs to change?

Ping

There’s an old computer command that you can use to check if a remote machine has crashed – it’s called “ping”. So you can ping a machine, say one called Captain Carrot, and get the response “Captain Carrot is alive”. If the machine is down, or the network is down between you and the machine, you will eventually get “No response from Captain Carrot.”

Far back in the mists of time, when I was a postgrad, this was a handy shorthand among computer scientists. If I hadn’t heard from Fred for a while, but didn’t have anything particular to say, I’d just send a ping: “Ping Fred”. Usually I’d get the response “Fred is alive.”

Occasionally I’d get something more creative, like “Fred has been eaten by his thesis.” Either way, it would trigger a conversation, of varying length depending on the ferocity of the thesis. It was a light way of checking in with each other. Ping says “I’m thinking of you, how ya doin’?”

It says “I don’t want to interrupt, but I’m here and want to stay connected. If you’ve got time, let’s chat. If not, just know that I’m here.”

It says “I’ve got a moment of spare time, and thought of you.”

These days our spare time is spent trawling the web, reading status updates, and watching meaningless youtube vidoes. When I have a moment free, I sit down and check my email, then trawl various news websites, read various articles I’m only marginally interested in, and check a host of social networking sites. I used to sit down, breathe, think of a friend and ping them.

Of course, there’s no need for pings these days. After all, we see Fred’s status updates on his social media of choice, and he sees ours. We know what’s going on in his life, right?

Notwithstanding the tendency of platforms like Facebook to heavily trim the number of updates that you actually see, hands up if you post everything that’s going on with you online? Do you post the huge argument you had with your boss (who, incidentally, you are friends with on facebook)? The health dramas going on in your family? Every last detail of your fears, worries, and uncertainties?

Few people do. We all have lines we don’t cross when it comes to broadcasting our lives (even me, tough though that may be to believe). And even if we did post it all online, clicking “like” doesn’t come close to a ping. Clicking “like” says “I saw what you posted”. Ping says “I thought of you of my own accord and wanted to see how you’re doing”.

That’s when I think of you
It’s all that I can do
I’d go mad if it wasn’t for you

If not for the thought of you

The promise of dreams come true

I’d go mad if it wasn’t for you.

“That’s when I think of you”. 1927.

Even the facebook “poke”, more often than not, means little more than “Facebook suggested I poke you”.

Ping often leads to coffee or lunch. At the very least, it is a brief two way interaction. Clicking “like” leads to… well… to scrolling off the page. Moving on. Trawling the endless interwebs in search of lolcats.

Maybe we computer scientists were on to something with this “ping” stuff. Maybe the humble ping is a way of reconnecting in our highly connected but oddly detached world.

On that note, I have to go. Things to do, people to ping.

Connections

“Studies have shown that inducing fear about the way things are, without simultaneously giving people a sense of purpose, can actually suppress their immune system – it will make them unwell.”

John-Paul Flintoff in “How to Change the World“

Climate Change is a perfect storm of this kind of fear – it feels too large for us to have any impact, so it is depressing and demoralising.  But imagine if you rode to work a few times a week, or started walking to the local shops rather than driving. And imagine if that small act inspired one or two other people to try the same. And they inspired others. Suddenly you could have exponential growth in people using feet rather than cars – huge change, not just in your own network, but spreading out into the world. All from the example you set by changing your habits in a public, visible way.

In “How to Change the World,” the School of Life‘s John-Paul Flintoff points out that our every action, or inaction, does change the world. He argues convincingly that those of us who are no Gandhi or Martin Luther King nonetheless have an impact with everything we do. Sometimes we make things seem possible by showing that they can be done. Sometimes we teach people things, whether we meant to or not. Sometimes we inadvertently show people what not to do.

Perhaps, rather than being pure threat, climate change is an opportunity. Perhaps some of those things we need to do to tackle climate change – use less fossil fuels, grow more of our own food, learn ways of living more sustainably – are actually opportunities to build local communities?

I have noticed that walking to the local shops leads to lots of small conversations with local people – those tending their gardens, or checking their mail, or even getting in and out of their cars. When you are speeding through a neighbourhood doing 50kph in a big metal box, not only are conversations with people on the footpath impossible, you are most unlikely even to catch someone’s eye. On my bike, I have got to know the runner near my kids’ school. The guy who spends a lot of time in his driveway, working on his car. The gardener around the corner. The girl with a skateboard down the road. A couple of teenage boys at the local high school who like the look of our box bike. And countless others.

I don’t necessarily know their names, but they are tangible connections in an increasingly disconnected world.

One of my long held gripes with my suburban lifestyle is the lack of community. So often we step from our houses directly into our garages and then into our cars, sacrificing any opportunity to feel connected to our neighbourhood. We pick up the kids from school by driving up to the gate (or as close as we can get) and honking the horn. We are too busy and too stressed to arrange playdates for our kids, and when we do we frequently drop the kids and run, taking the opportunity to be busy, busy, busy – terribly productive, and terribly disconnected.

Perhaps this, too, is an opportunity. Perhaps I’m not the only person seeking a local community. Perhaps I’m not the only person worried about climate change and trying to live more sustainably. Perhaps I can find ways to build my own local network. Perhaps you can, too.