The need to know

I’ve got a course coming up and I’ve been revising and updating my handouts and materials. It’s a course that encourages people to pass on their personal stories within their own families. They do it by putting together reminiscences, experiences, everyday thoughts… the stuff of conversation. And assembling these as a well-bound book.

In the course of my recent revisions, I spoke to a few bookbinders. One pointed out to me that someone who did as I was suggesting, and passed it on in their family, could well be responsible for the only book to be found in the home of a descendant, decades or centuries from now.

The course is called With Love: gifting your stories to grandchildren.

Imagine having in your family a book of personal writings that had been handed down, generation to generation for 400-500 years.

There's no quick way to come up with a treasure like that — but it's never too late to start. And for the past 24 years, I’ve offered these courses in New Zealand, Scotland and Canada.

Through the ages, in every culture you can think of, elders have handed on their stories. It has to continue. It's a responsibility they have to the younger generations. My hope’s long been to encourage more of our elders to meet that responsibility and make their gift to the future.

It’s something that's a bit weak in the West — we've got used to thinking the big, public stories are the really 'important' ones.

But start listening to the ordinary stories of ordinary people: you’ll find them connecting time and again with the universal experiences of humanity, and with each other. Story-sharing is the start of every friendship and the best stories are about the ordinary, personal things that touch us all.

But, especially across generations, people can find it difficult to hand stories on. The extended family no longer sits around the fire.  As a teacher of cultural awareness to people working across cultures as nurses, journalists, police officers — young people who often knew very little about their immediate ancestors — I saw that as the problem to be overcome.

The need seemed to be for some new medium. It had to be compact, portable, reproducible ... durable and robust, and it would help if it had an increasing potential value.  It needed to be easily accessible, independently attractive and as independent of particular technologies as possible.

It’s so simple it sounds silly, but the best option is to make a book: a special book that can become an heirloom. My inspiration was a friend’s family Bible, damaged but not destroyed, that spent six months under water before being salvaged from the wreck of the ferry Wahine that sank in New Zealand’s Cook Strait in 1968.

I’ve since been totally persuaded by the splendid collections of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany: properly constructed books are the way to go.

THE FIRST With Love course was offered it as an adult short course in 1988 at Whangarei, New Zealand, where I was teaching journalism and cultural awareness.

I remember a bit of official discomfort with the title but to me it was the only title that made sense of what I was trying to achieve with the course. I wanted to express my skills and experience in the simplest possible way to encourage people to hand on their own stories so that their children's children would have a keener sense of who they are and where they have come from.

I saw With Love as an approach, not as a single, simply-explained thing. Explanation wasn't the point... doing it was the point.

I put a lot of myself into that first course. I couldn't believe how well it went: and those wonderful people! They fired me up to offer the course whenever I could and I've done that over the years." And their popularity steadily grew.

We are living in the midst of ephemera… more and more of our experience is virtual and none of it seems to lead anywhere that’s particularly reassuring on enlightening. So I see more and more people sacrificing intellect, integrity and aspirations for almost any kind of apparent certainty. As the West continues to be drawn inexorably into ever-greater centralization of power and wealth, so it falls towards collapse: it the old, oft-repeated cycle of centralization and collapse.

As victims, we victimize; living without assurances or consequence, we grow assertive… and all we achieve seems to further the dissipation of meaning and responsibility. Visions meet with skepticism, ideals meet cynicism, creativity meets exploitation, and acquisition compounds disappointment. We can even lose the courage to be joy-filled and hopeful.

But the World continues to throw up beauty all around us — we just have to be bothered to look and listen — so our anguished confusion is not absolute, nor its it to do with reality — it’s within. It’s existential.

Each of us needs to know who we are. That’s a gift our elders can give us, no matter how right, wrong or misled they have been about the perplexities of modernity and postmodernity.

I launched the ‘With Love’ courses at a time when I was living in a community where that wasn’t happening: I came to realize that very few of my young journalism and nursing students had a clear or helpful sense of their personal origins and influences. Busy lives, mobility and social change had interrupted the age-old flow of wisdom from one generation to the next. The ordinary, intimate family stories were seldom getting told. So I went to my students’ grandparents — in person. They told me there was never time.

The extended family no longer sits around the fire.

But I have since found, over and over again, that a lovingly-prepared and well-presented collection of personal writing inevitably attains a value of its own and is probably the best way to hand on stories that might otherwise never be told.

One day, someone in the family will read one of the stories. And another.

Once one story is read, it can never be “un-read”: it has broken the barriers of time and place… and generations yet unborn may one day start writing their stories too…

We all need a sense of selfhood, of existential “rightness” or “fitness”, of necessary continuity, to withstand the torrents of ephemeralism and resist the pressures to conform to ideologies and dogmas that are, all too clearly, calamitous.

We need to know who we are — as unique individual human beings — before we can approach other people and other cultures with the confidence, respect and compassion that are needed to save us from self-destruction. That confidence, respect and compassion can open doors to new ways of being together as people and as communities, of sharing, of trusting, of finding firm common ground… of making a future that works.

The book is currently out of print: sorry about that.

Beyond time's boundaries

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HOW is it that we seem so securely locked into unidirectional time? Everything but time seems to have more dimensions and directions than we can know. Time is something we experience plainly enough, as life’s tomorrows turn to yesterdays… or do we merely imagine it?

We live on a turning planet that orbits its sun and is itself orbited by a moon; a planet turning at some other speed in some other orbit around some other sun would give its creatures a different experience of the succession of nights and days we call time but how different would the raw nature of time be?  Our time is conventionally bound to conditions and perspectives that are unique to our planet, yet different cultures have found different ways to organise concepts of time around those perspectives and “measured” time has been variously understood as cyclic or linear despite broadly similar experiences of days and seasons, flows and tides, hunger and satiation, births and deaths and bodily changes, and contexts of constant change. Measured time has long been problematic, not least because the natural phenomena on which the definitions have been based are themselves variable.  (The current scientific definition of one second of time is impossible for us to relate to in our day to day lives — it’s based on the transition periods of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom at rest at absolute zero: 9,192, 631,770 of them….)

So desperately does the so-called “human condition” cry out for illusions of order in the midst of apparent chaos that it’s hard not to imagine that time does not have something to do with consciousness. Does consciousness need some organizing construct to exist? Without the framework of time, would consciousness collapse into disjointed sensation? Do we imagine time as a kind of skeleton, a helpful illusion or construct that’s necessary to give consciousness a form we can experience and utilize? Do we need a concept like time to lift experience from an ocean of chaos and personalise it as a sense of selfhood?

Certainly, a living organism without consciousness (as we think of it) can continue to exist, morphing from one generation to another with no pressing need for individuality and, arguably, with no particular attachment to time. After all, our own DNA carries physical, identifiable remnants of life’s earliest origins. (See: Creation story…)

Without time, would our conscious existence, perhaps more realistically, be just another mystery?

Consciousness, after all — even our personal experience of “time” — is individualistic; and our sensations of it stretch or contract depending on what we’re doing.

Simply “being” is rendered difficult by the album of our memories. First experiences become consequential to a conscious being, memories of them coloring every subsequent approach or aversion. Pull away the struts of time and who would you or I be?

But experience radiates backwards and forwards in time. I walk, for example, through an unkempt field. It is midsummer. Long-stemmed seedheads arch over the purple vetch and mauve clover flowers. A warm breeze sends satiny waves of shade and light through the long grass. Dandelion heads, fragile, grey, sway on the point of disintegration; tiny, white, ten-petalled flowers are knitted into cool, dark spaces close to the ground and, when I part the grass I see a solitary five-petalled pink flower. It is tiny. Above them rise the gaudy yellow blooms of some other weed. There seems no particular order to it all but that does not stop the field laying down a fresh sheet of memories in my being that in some slight but enduring way alters the sum of myself.

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 A change has taken place that’s side-stepped my conscious control: something that’s not to do just with the various ways of “knowing” but also with my ways of coming to know. It gently recalibrates the ways I open or close to whatever experiences follow, and even to the memories that have already stored themselves away in the complicated networks of my consciousness.

What is especially hard to imagine is the consciousness that was the sum of “me” before the field. That “self” has passed in an instant. Could I ever return to my earlier engagement with life as though the field had never existed?

For example, how do I now remember the summit of Mt Ruapehu in New Zealand. I vividly remember the day, the friends I climbed with, snatches of 40 year-old conversation, even the feel of the wind on my face. In my being, that peak now seems just a little higher than it was before I walked in the field, the wind a little sharper. There are remembered seas that seem a little wilder, moments that seem sweeter, or funnier. All of them passed long ago, except in my memory, and even there they are susceptible to change.

The malleability of memories is well known. And it points to dimensions of what’s called “learning” that go far beyond skill sets and adaptive, utilitarian “knowledge” to the shaping and shading-in of the “person”. Yet the experiences that manipulate our memories and personhood are not of our own making, and their impacts and effects can only very loosely and unreliably be predicted, even if we have chosen to set out on on a particular path of action and interaction. Outcomes are constructed in the loosest and bluntest of ways. The nuances of meaning are always discoveries after the fact.

Besides, the will we exercise when we make our choices has also been shown to carry the scars and rewards of our pasts. Consciousness is acted upon as significantly as it acts, yet we accept its governance over our lives as the mediator of both our intentions and the experiences our actions lead us into.

We grant consciousness its authority because it feels like the stuff of our “selves”. Moreover, it shapes our interactions with other people and is fitted into the bedrock of whatever society we have become a part of. But it is a mistake to never question its nature or challenge its easily mistaken and often misleading dictates. Our consciousness can lead us into false complexities and unhelpful choices; ways of being that cripple our true capacities and trap us in apparent inevitabilities.

Time is the mainstay of its throne and the linchpin of its seamless coherence. Measured time can become a dictatorship that crushes questions and subjugates the soul, that often opaque inner sanctum of our being, and turns selfhood into servitude. Life, no longer an open-ended adventure becomes a steep pyramid of goals and factitious “needs”.

Letting go of time is the secret to restoring the balance of the self’s countless illusory and sometimes painfully contradictory understandings of what we “know”  — all the supposed causes and effects — and the felt compulsions of our life’s apparent trajectory, of its boundaries and possibilities.

One way to step back from time and the rule of unquestioned selfhood is meditation. Meditation is often taught with its own encumbrances and contextual baggage. But at its essential core, in offers simple, effective techniques — a focus on the breath, for example — that banish time from our awareness.

Another way to thwart time is to enter into the experience of sights and sounds that deepen our engagement with beauty — and they are readily available all around us, in a patch of unkempt grass, in the labyrinth-like tracery of a spider’s web, in the natural flow of water, in the muttering embers of a spent fire, in the elegant structure of a flower and the detailed form of a tree, in the gait of an insect, in the gatherings and passages of clouds, in the slow-cycling of the stars… in the letting go of that compulsion to understand and systematize and explain. Nature is at its core chaotic, and when its chaos produces what we recognize as beauty, it has the power to overlay our accumulated memories with a rich cloth of reassurance. It is reassurance without meaning, without particular content: it is a reassurance that comes from transcendence into the intact, undissected coherence of elemental, restorative beauty. Entering into it without anything more than openness to the experience it offers lets the self to get on with that recalibration of all that we are that is sometimes called “inspiration”.

Recognising and accepting the gift of beauty is a respite from the snares of time and the domination of a noise-filled, damaged and fatigued consciousness. It just takes a summoning of the will to see gently and trust open discerningly but deeply… and let the self rediscover coherence in contexts of joy.

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Seen the news today?

...towards 'restorative news'

IT’s amply been demonstrated that gloomy, violent and troubling television news reports encourage us to catastrophise our personal anxieties; they encourage us to focus more vividly on worst-case scenarios in our own lives. They spoil more than our day.

Researchers have documented the extent to which the enormous attention given to the 9/11 attacks in the United States, for example, with television networks endlessly running images of the collapsing World Trade Centre towers, intensified whatever stress and depression people had been feeling before 9/11.

Extended media coverage stepped up the impact of the terror attack.

One research group identified the emotions stirred up by vicarious exposure to the attack as ranging from shock and anger, through fear and anxiety to feelings of helplessness, guilt and depression. During the first week, shock and anger tended to subside, but anxiety and depression-related emotions deepened. The more time people spent in front of the television, the greater were the impacts.



BUT it happens all the time: “bad” news is not hard to find, and a diet of “bad” news has known physical and emotional consequences. Now it's the stupid economy. And those consequences are certain to flow on into society at large, given the spread and reach of mainstream media.

This could easily turn into a “so let’s shoot the messenger” rant… and, indeed, the media are commonly blamed for all sorts of societal failures. But I believe it’s a far deeper issue than that.

Sources of information have become so numerous, so pervasive, so heterogeneous, so entangled with entertainment and so idiosyncratic that any big “story” almost instantly shatters into dozens of angles, interpretations and versions. Meaning dissolves into floods of images and assertions: confirmations, denials and conspiracy theories, re-tellings, deceptions and misconceptions.

In this post-Murdoch era, print media have very largely abandoned their credibility. For various reasons, television, having never managed to find itself, has become background noise that’s influential only through the imagery it disseminates. Radio — a medium with tremendous potential — has very largely become a low-level promotional tool and source of free muzak. And the Internet thrives as a cauldron of hopelessly relativistic nonsense.

In this information environment, most of us inhabit tiny zones of immediate personal consequence and necessarily tend to exponentially trivialise information according to its distance from the centre that is ourself.

The forces of information overload are nudging us towards ever-narrowing individualisation and away from socialisation; ironically, globalisation is leading us not to any celebration of our universal humanity but away from it. Bespoke worlds are the order of the future. Games designers and the like are designing and manufacturing them now, and gaming principles are being experimented with in workplaces. We are become less articulate and more removed from decision-making as we undertake humanity’s next great migration: the journey to virtual worlds. There, we will find we all have become slaves.

In many ways, you could claim that journey began long ago, certainly with the advent of the printing press: the ability it gave us to freeze particular versions of narratives into an enduring, portable form that could be widely distributed. To the Western mind at least, bookish reality has long seemed to offer clearer certainties than the fluid mutability of oral tradition where a single narrative can unfold into many meanings depending on the contexts in which it is heard and the particular ways it is told. A book can seem to escape its contexts and, distanced from us, tempt us to grant it far more universality and authority than it ever, in fact, has deserved.

The book was brought low, though, as per-unit production costs fell and literacy became a norm. The paperback revolution placed ephemeral and trivial publications on shelves that, till then, had been reserved for “literature”, a status conferred by the fact of publication. Book publishers quickly turned status objects into recyclable pulp; no longer was typography a badge of esteem or authority.

At the same time, riding high on the fallacy that seeing in believing, television — a medium that was originally hailed as the harbinger of worldwide educational opportunity — was almost immediately lured into a business model that subordinated content to mass appeal and advertising revenues. Along with mass-market cinema, it made a god of entertainment and, in doing so, opened the door to new media able to far more cost-effectively serve that god.

The trajectory has been from elitism to populism, as though those are the only options, as though they are necessary polar opposites.

For as long as we see things that way, we are likely to remain blinded to the fundamental social need for narrative.

Narrative is the source of social meaning. As communities, we tend to care nothing for things we do know nothing about. “Knowing” in this context is not about facts or theories or data and statistics. It is about the intimacies of encounter.

It seems to me that we’re not helped by news styles that present world events as a disordered succession of ugly detonations; as ongoing tableaux of inexplicable violence and catastrophe that sometimes occur close at hand and at other times explode far away. “News” has become a sensationalist feeding frenzy. It does nothing but cultivate a widespread state of anxiety and hovering gloom. Its widespread consequences are most likely to include the rekindling of atavistic fears of strangers, change and risk exposure. And this is what the “news” media and much internet chatter tends very largely to do.

As a daily newspaper journalist it often nagged at me that what I was doing — what “we” were doing — was excerpting incidents from the ongoing flow of activity around us and clipping it to fit in five, ten or twenty column inches of type as if they were independent, free-standing events. Of course, they were not.

The incidents we presented as “news” were all part of far larger stories of causes and consequences, people and circumstances, very little of which could possibly fit into the stories we published. And, of course, by the time any of these stories were read, life had moved on. A news story gives a glimpse of what was, not what is. And it is a partial, incomplete glimpse at best. Seldom does a news story have room for any meaning.

I had a particular loathing of court and crime stories. They are basically cheap and easy to get, a stenographic job at best. And they trivialise it all. The format is simple: a few words from the charge sheet, maybe a pithy quote from the judge (if there’s one to be had), and a note of sentencing. There is no room in the story for explanations, and subsequent appeals seldom make it into print. But, if you sit down with the perpetrator or the victim, with an arresting officer, with a lawyer, or with somebody’s mother, you can find stories, real stories. These stories often have little to do with the charge or the sentence, and everything to do with the intimacies of encounter that carry meaning. What happens in court is the depersonalised working out of an institutional process, and the less intimacy the better. Nobody really lives there.

The reader gets nothing of substance from this sort of reporting, nothing of use and no understanding or meaning.

News is, I believe, absolutely necessary. It is essential to us individually and communally. But news need not be clinically depressing. Nor does it all need to be escapist jolliness. It just needs to be real.

But news gathering and presentation are in crisis. You’ll find it evidenced everywhere, whether it be in the opinionated inaccuracies of an amateur’s blog, in a manicured segment of a prestigious television network’s prime time newscast, in a carefully edited radio news item with its obligatory clip of gritty actuality, or in a facts-filled item in a leading daily newspaper. The crisis is its meaninglessness.

Meaninglessness is what gets in the way of our engaging and our understanding.

To introduce meaning to news presentation, there is a desperate need to learn afresh from the basic elements of effective narrative as they’ve been known for millennia in oral traditions.

An effective narrative shows transformation and consequence, in involves change; a narrative has characters whose actions make sense, even if only to them. An effective narrative is essentially compassionate. An effective narrative invites us to enter into a situation and relate it to our own experience. An effective narrative respects all of it characters, even the “evil-doers”. An effective narrative helps us to understand ourselves, not just our surroundings. An effective narrative challenges and changes our assumptions and enhances our way of seeing things.

How might it be applied to news work?

A community newspaper I once edited won an award because one of my staff was willing to spend a week working alongside a make-work project team, spot-spraying and grubbing thistles on farmland. Mainstream coverage tended to feed a stereotype of lazy bums and beneficiaries getting a timely taste of the meaning of a day’s work. My reporter was able to write about an energetic group of people delighted to be part of a team with some purpose available to it, with a role and a challenge, instead of feeling isolated by a contemptuous community that they felt consistently denied them opportunities to work.

The feedback from the coverage was all positive and I believe the community benefitted. My reporter got over her blisters and aching back and, I think, was all the more glad to be a journalist.

To cover crime, I encouraged reporters to talk to police, criminals and criminologists and write about perceived “problems” rather than cryptic entries on charge sheets; to look into why different types of crime might be happening. To cover local body meetings, I encouraged reporters to get out and talk with the people who would be affected by a decision before the meeting at which a decision would be made, rather than transcribing agenda entries.

I wouldn't say that this is never happening, just that we could use is as a norm.

The key to what I’d call “restorative journalism” is getting the story, not just the “facts”; facts tell us far less than they purport; the story tells us far more.

Shared stories draw us together; facts, too often, push us apart.