A moving splash.
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Last weekend, in Bavaria:
A satisfying plopping sound as the stone plunges into the river. It’s accompanied by a frothy splash and a momentary column of water shooting up.
The river is moving fast. It’s a milky blue-green in the centre, carrying chalky minerals from the surrounding Bavarian Alps. At the edges, where my son stands with his toes almost touching the chilly water, it’s clear and brilliant.
I throw another stone, with the same effect. He giggles and looks up at me as if I’ve performed some feat of magic. He throws one himself, smaller and closer. There’s a smaller plop and ripples out. He’s pleased with his effort and begins to look for more pebbles on the shore.
We carry on like this, finding stones and lobbing them into the rushing mass of water, me occasionally remarking on our efforts like a sports commentator.
As I throw mine into the middle, I notice the splash moves with the current of the water, starting in one place and ending a couple of feet further downstream. I’m quite taken by this although not sure why.
After a little while, I hear someone coming down the short path to the edge of the river. It’s a man in a towel. It’s early in the morning, most people in the campsite are still asleep so I’m surprised but not displeased to see him. He has a cheerful look about him, ruddy cheeks and tousled dark hair, eyes with pronounced creases from smiling.
We exchange hellos and he asks me in German if I’ve ventured into the river to enjoy its freshness. “Nein” I say emphatically, and he laughs heartily.
He speaks again and I can’t quite understand so I apologise for my German. He switches to English effortlessly and repeats what he said:
“Do you mind if I go into the river here? I just wanted to check because I don’t want to set a bad example for your little boy” he says, gesturing towards my son.
“Of course”, I reply, struck by his thoughtfulness.
We carry on chatting as he removes his towel and wades into the icy river. A couple of metres in, he sits down on a rock that I realise is conveniently shaped like a chair. As he faces the onrushing water, up to his midriff in it, he explains, “The current is so strong but here you can sit with your back to the rock and you’re safe.”
A minute or so later, he emerges naked from water that I know is so cold, it makes your skin sting. He is grinning widely as he wraps his towel around himself.
We stand and chat for a while. He enquires after my work and where I live. I share and ask him the same and he tells me he’s a carpenter in a small Bavarian village of 800 people, making furniture, houses and tools.
“That must be nice”, I say, “To work with your hands so much, to make things?”.
“It is”, he smiles.
“But it’s getting harder. I’m almost 60 now. I’m heading for a hike with my friends”, gesturing now towards the campsite, “and I’m wondering if I’ll make it!”
I suppress the glib urge to tell him he looks in rude health for a 60-year-old man. We exchange cheerful goodbyes, my son waving at him as he walks back up the path.
We carry on throwing stones into the river. The morning sun is now blazing against the top half of the mountain opposite us. The sticky heat of the day is already rising. Insects buzz around the edges of the water.
I throw another large one, noticing again how the splash moves with the current of the river.
***
With the benefit of long hindsight, my childhood in a small market town in the UK had an idyllic quality to it. From the age of 11, I lived across the road from the primary school and secondary school that I attended, giving me access to the vast school grounds and playing fields.
At the bottom end of those fields was the river that ran through our town. At its shallowest, it was only ankle deep and perhaps as much as waist deep in other points. At its widest, it was probably no more than six or seven metres.
This narrow river was flanked by trees and wooded areas. To us, these felt like ancient Sherwood-like forests, but were in fact more like large copses and spinneys.
My friends Peter and Paul lived within five minutes walk of my house. We spent countless, long days in the fields, along the river and in the woods. Peter taught me how to fish and we’d occasionally stand on the river bank trying to hook minnows. Even then, our days felt like they had a Huckleberry Finn quality to them.
There was one day where I hadn’t been able to head out with Peter and Paul for some reason. The next day, they were excitedly talking about Skully Island, a rare and special place they had discovered.
“What’s Skully Island?” I said.
“We’ll show you.”
It turned out Skully Island was nothing more than a slightly curved section of the river with a large flat wooded area almost entirely shaded by trees, named, unbeknownst to me, after the mythical island in The Goonies.
This area was not visible until you passed through the overhang of the first trees above the rough path, which had the effect of stumbling upon a shrouded secret enclave. To an adult, this would be merely a pleasant part of the river path. To us, it was magical.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
At some point, perhaps 13 or so, Peter received a Super Nintendo from his parents for his birthday. He loved arcade games more than any of us, so we occasionally spent time indoors, usually hooked to Street Fighter II.
Yet, still, our preference was to be roaming outdoors - our first instinct each day was to choose between football, cricket bat, tennis rackets, bikes or fishing rods. Often it was a combination of these.
If we spent more than a couple of hours indoors, we felt fidgety and bored. Life was outside, in the everyday world that was anything but mundane. As kids we didn’t walk past forests and fields, we walked through them. Trees were to be climbed, streams to be splashed in.
Even a lamppost or a set of roadworks was an opportunity for mischief and play. A construction site or an abandoned building was manna from heaven, the prospect of trespass and real danger, possibly the thrill of being angrily chased by an adult.
But most of all, we spent uninterrupted, unsupervised time engaged with our surroundings. We had no choice. This was the late 80s and early 90s, and none of us had rich parents. Although games consoles were becoming popular, there was no internet, no-one we knew had a mobile phone and there were four TV channels.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
Days spent idling were mandatory and, in retrospect, glorious. A random chuck of a pebble by one of us could quickly become a two-hour sport. Long hours spent sitting in trees or walking the streets were filled with endless childish musings about life.
To say I long for those days is an understatement. I’m tired of technological progress. I’m particularly tired of a narrative of progress that is only ever a positive one. Look at our glorious satellites and rockets! Behold our algorithms and binary code intelligence! See our magical portable devices! Come see how sick and lonely our people are!
Are we not all tired of it yet? Like Maximus in the Colosseum, shouldn’t we also be screaming, “ARE YOU NOT SICK OF BEING ENTERTAINED???”
I’m certain that we have overcomplicated our lives.
We overstimulate our children, and ourselves, too, if we’re honest about it. We need less, not more. Less of everything that is artificial, that mediates our relationships and disrupts our connectedness with life.
Pay attention to what you long for most. Life is out there. If we’re willing to go engage with it, some of it might seep in and fill our hearts.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
— ‘Leisure’, William Henry Davies
Tipping Point: navigating collapse and crisis.
“Most of us, at least in the more developed countries, do lead pretty good lives now. Regardless of whether we sense crisis, the bottom fact is we live pretty well. But it seemed to me that there's an implicit argument in the assumption that innovation will always bail us out of problems.
And the assumption is that the productivity of innovation remains constant over time, that innovation, say, 50 years from now, will be as productive as it is now… but what we found was that productivity of innovation has actually declined over the period of our study by over 20%.”
Joseph Tainter is one of the foremost thinkers on civilisational collapse. In this excellent interview, he explains some of his key research and ideas, including why increasing complexity of our societies is a fundamental problem.
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