It’s very nice to “take time every day to think through your day and see if there’s anything you can be genuinely grateful for”. But such advice also makes me a little sick. Why don’t our social-media lists of “today I am grateful for…” start with breathable air (thank you, Shanghai), clean running water (thank you, Sahara), and supermarkets overflowing with foodstuffs? How numb do you have to be before it requires a deliberate hunt through your day to see “if there’s anything” you can be glad of? If there’s anything? Anything? How slowly and creakingly does this process have to run before it will effect an actual change in our over-consuming, greedy, wasteful, polluting and entitled habits? We are wrecking our globe. Very fast. Not just for us but also for the people who have no clean running water and for the children of the children who work in toxic factories making our iPhones. There is no point blaming ourselves for the lassitude and ennui, the misery of depression and anxiety that too much meaningless abundance and a dearth of social connection and life’s meaning inevitably creates. I get that reminding ourselves to be grateful is a huge improvement on whinging and complaining, like the woman on the home renovations TV show who wailed when her house was passed in at auction This Is the Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened In My Entire Life!!! But I want us to change faster and wake up more thoroughly. And glib phrasings like this one on Upworthy “Add #365Grateful to your Instagram photos and instantly be part of the gratitude movement!” make me feel ashamed. How bleak would that sentence feel to a hungry person, a person without land or a roof, someone who’s living out their adulthood in an endless refugee camp that stretches in tents as far as the sandy horizon. How they must wish that people who have enough disposable income to give each other cards and presents on so many occasions annually that two weeks from Christmas we are already complaining about Valentines and Easter merchandise in the shops ~ ~ ~ would be more than grateful.
Tag: gadgets
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shop of owls
Went into my favourite bookshop today, which has owls carved of different woods stashed in all its corners. For the first time I noticed the sign on the back of the door: Antiquarian shops are places of inner peace. There followed a series of red circles crossed by red lines, like no-through-road signs for traffic: no headphones. No mobile calls. No shouting.
However I was so delighted I broke the rules immediately, by shouting. The proprietor, who is always barefoot or wearing a pair of rubber thongs & who drinks at one of the cafes I love, had got up from his desk at the back of the shop to say hello. “Inner peace!” I called over, beaming. “No mobile phones! I love this!”
He came down between the stacks of books which seem both wobbly and solid. “Most people like the hectic,” he suggested (it makes more sense in German). “Never stopping for a minute.”
“To never need to think!” I said. “To never… never die, right?” He nodded his head and we gazed at each other with a feeling, or so it seemed to me, on this one subject of utter likemindedness. Us & the owls. Hoo hoo.
