Questions lost and found.

We and I are not lost.

It’s amazing what turns up. When you aren’t expecting it. Your mind is on a totally different track, expecting something already, based on past experiences, and then, change. Not what your past has prepared you for. Not what your understanding of the world so far has led you to imagine is possible. Sometimes we deliberately engineer this scenario in places called schools and colleges and universities and we call it learning. Formal study. It is so formal. Others explicitly prepare experiences for you that will update your understanding and expand what you think is possible. You agree to it and expect it, so the gift and miracle of formal study is often lost on us.

As we grow into our lives, we have seemingly encountered more and more of what we might encounter in our environments and much of our experience reinforces our existing view of the world rather than changing it. Some of us become comfortable in this state and avoid anything that could change us and actively, even violently, reject anything that might if confronted by it. Which goes a little way to explaining what aging actually is, why travel is so exhilarating and terrifying and many of the conflicts between people at every scale.

But returning to our own, apparently singular lives, we are constantly learning. There are always new experiences which expand our understanding. Our expectations shift. Our hoped for possibilities multiply or deepen or focus. We can’t not learn and the process is essential for our survival. That is what this is all about. Survival. We act to survive. We learn so we know how to act to survive. One of our deepest instincts remains survival. Which is fine and good and helpful. What that means is also altered compared to what it meant a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago and further.

Survival requires food, shelter and security. On an individual basis. As a species we add in procreation. We have used our incredible abilities to harness myriad ways to help us consistently access these essentials of living and surviving. Which gives us the stability we need to procreate. So much so that we have overshot by quite some distance without realising it. Survival has turned into the pursuit of comfort for all, convenience for the masses and luxury for the privileged. Some populations are excelling at this despite the paradox it creates around finding fulfilment and joy in life, while other populations remain hungry and vulnerable. Often within the same imagined countries.

Our global society remains locked in a survivalist view of human life while living in an abundant, albeit unevenly distributed world. Our philosophies and actions still pursue the basics of survival which have, for many, been met and lacking clarity on what to do now, we are turning our old tools to new ends. We seem to want more survival, better survival, longer survival. More comfort, more convenience, more luxury, more of the same. We are serving the same answers to different questions. We’ve lost our way and a collective sense of frantic, directionless inertia has taken hold because, as a species, we are out of ideas about what to do next. We are just riffing on an old theme and it is getting us and all other life on earth into lots of trouble.

Or so I thought.

Questions-lost-and-found - Gavin-Birchall

Until I was out on a long walk with my wife. We were getting our bodies and minds a little more prepared for an even longer multi-day walk we had planned. We’d made it out of the city, only just survived a very close encounter with a herd of bulls and found ourselves at a nature reserve on the outskirts of urbanity. Arriving on foot is such a different way to know a place. Down a narrow footpath, amongst reeds and trees we walked. Next to the waters edge with the lake stretching out away from us. The uncommonly attractive visitor centre stood up to its knees in its own softly rippling reflection. It was a lovely Spring day and the birds who make this place their home were voicing their appreciation. A little tired, I am eyes on the path and I see a scrap of paper.

Litter I think. Another sign of our forgetful ways. I pick it up to put in the bin only yards away and carry on walking. Crossing the bridge to the centre we pause and for some reason I think to look at the litter before I put it in the recycling. Then I notice that this is no ordinary litter. It is a scrap of paper that meant something. To someone. Who had not thrown it away but who had lost it. Five found questions were scribbled on the jagged sheet. And five words along with them. Rough torn paper. No deliberate attempt to write neatly for others. This was a record of personal reflection. A sense making. A wondering. A hope.

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What trying to do?

How trying to do it?

How know a track?

If not a track?

What doing about it?

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Ambition.

Focus.

Clarity.

Urgency.

Irreversibility.

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Evidence. That others are questing for something else. These are deeper questions and not to do with basic survival. They are the kind of questions we each and collectively need to be asking. Which, in the finding of lost questions I re-learned that we are. And I was encouraged. What a treasure. What a gift! If this scrap of magic can be found so accidentally, so unnecessarily and so wonderfully, along the literal path that I tread then we are not lost. We and I are not lost. I remembered that we are all, each of us, asking these kinds of questions. But perhaps we are too shy to share. Too small to respond on our own amidst systems built around old questions. Systems that keep us separate and have us believe in individuation and strip us of the dwindling security that comes with community. Both human and especially non-human.

This walk, on this day, in this place and along this path brought me to find some togetherness with someone I will never know. Another human, another world and another kind of pursuit. The pursuit of what is required to be changed by our current experiences after meeting them as they are. The courage to risk new thoughts about what is called for now. What I, we and all of life needs us to be for each other.

https://human-at-large.com/

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