Finding the goodness
I’m delighted that the States of Guernsey have decided to end the discrimination between vaccinated and non-vaccinated travellers to the Common Travel Area (why it makes any difference elsewhere I have no idea, Covid is Covid is Covid the world over). I’m sorry to all those people who took the vaccine simply to be able to travel.
It’s a weird state of affairs isn’t it, that these days we take vaccines for purposes other than health and wellbeing. Back in the day that WAS the reason we took vaccines, but with Covid, for many, it became about travel instead.
Mind you, I’m not sure why I’m surprised, we live in a topsy turvy world where we think that happiness is found in material possessions and self-worth is found in recognition on social media. As I mentioned in one of my recent blogs, my friend, Marie, who recently died from cancer, taught me a lot about this - that happiness is found mainly in love; everything else becomes quite irrelevant in the end, I mean you can’t take your possessions with you and social media, well, I won’t even go there.
I always remember a successful businessman friend saying to me that he’d rather be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy, and I did think this made a lot of sense. But it seems that the more we ‘progress’ as a society, the unhappier we become and the more we feel less human.
I love Steve Biddulph’s new book, Fully Human, as he says it like it is:
“The hyper capitalist life - rushing, stressing, consuming - takes a terrible toll on families, which we just assume is normal. And if it’s normal, then there must be something wrong with us - and our family - that we can’t keep up. Just as women in the 1950s thought there must be something wrong with them when they weren’t fulfilled in aprons, cooking scones, contemporary men and women feel inadequate that they can’t sustain the lonely, competitiveness harshness of twenty-first-century life. Our children too are growing up in a world that’s increasingly nasty, aggressive and punishing of everyone who does not meet impossible standards in things that really don’t matter at all - such as fashion, body shape and possessions. So many really terrible problems that readers will recognise - divorce, anxiety and stress in children, rebellion and self-harm in teenagers - are the direct consequence of this”.
I do believe it is a significant time in history, threshold, and we really do need to be conscious of the decisions we make and the choices we take, not only for ourselves but for our children and their children too. I am involved in the Children’s Forest Project and this is based on a book called The Children’s Fire and the work of Mac Macartney. The Children’s Fire is basically a pledge to the welfare of unborn future children (human and non-human alike) but more profoundly it’s a pledge to life, a commitment to the responsibility carried by each successive generation to safeguard the vitality and regenerative capacity of the earth. It insists on a circular economy and it views any action that compromises the wellspring of creativity from which our species has emerged as sacrilege, an act of betrayal, evidence hinting at insanity.
Decisions we make individually and collectively are important. We do not need to follow the common narrative, especially if it doesn’t feel right for us. Covid has helped people to question things, but I don’t know that people are questioning things enough, or caring enough either. The rug was pulled and the opportunity was given, but whether it’s been taken, well let’s hope it has, for humanity needs to be careful what it does next.
I highly recommend Steve’s book, it’s about new ways of using your mind, and forms the basis for a talk I’m giving later on being fully human and checking in, not checking up. There’s a message for us all there somewhere, about what it means to be fully human and being in touch with that. He makes some really valid comments about our ways of defining a human being and how this impacts on our relationship to others and relationship to self - if we see human beings are crappy, what does that say about us?
I’m constantly reminded at the moment of the goodness inside all of us. There is goodness in this world and the more we can find it inside ourselves, perhaps the more we see it outside ourselves, and vice versa too! I’m pleased that the States of Guernsey has showed more of its humanness and goodness these last few days, thank you.
Love Emma x
