Joanna is very partial to a TV quiz show called Only Connect, it’s the ultimate quizzers quiz.
It’s not enough to just know stuff, the contestants also have to make connections between the things they know and to do it quickly.
They are presented one by one with a series of words, numbers, pictures or music and they have to predict, as soon as possible the last one that will be in the sequence.
It’s usually brain-achingly difficult for somebody like me to even contemplate.
They are all very clever people with enormous brains, and with the extraordinary ability to retrieve information from them.
I am left in awe after each episode.
Recently though a team of these egg-headed boffins were presented with a series of clues that was, to me at least, very obvious - it was the rule of threes.
If you’re not aware of it, it’s an oft-quoted maxim used by survival types.
It’s a rule of thumb that you can survive for around 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food.
So clever are these folks that after 3 clues they correctly guessed the connection “Air (seconds)” but from their deliberations it was clear that they had to think cognitively about what the human body might need to survive.
Paradoxically this reveals a startling dis-connection, so clever are we as a species that we have forgotten the basics of life and this is why we are able to do what we do to the Earth.
It is easy to take these things for granted, cool clean air, the cosy shelter of our homes, clean drinking water on tap, warmth at the push of a button and an abundant variety of food.
There is a story told by Tim ‘Mac’ McCartney, he was asked by his native American mentors “what is of value to you”? He was uncertain in his answer and so they took him out into the Californian heat and left him there, they returned after 2 days and asked the question again, he still struggled to answer the question and they left him again without a word, when they returned on the 3rd day he knew exactly what was of value to him - water.
The things that are of the greatest value to humans are the things that enable life itself, air, shelter, water, fire, and food. The rule of 3s is not just a snappy aide memoir for bush-crafters it is sacred knowledge and we forget it at our peril.
In the modern world, and I’m guessing that if you’re reading this you probably inhabit that world, most people have forgotten the true value of these things, water flows magically from pipes, we live in centrally-heated or air-conditioned comfort, we can have any kind of food at any time of year.
We have become so used to this easy life that we have the luxury of taking it all for granted, we rarely give these things a second thought and less often still do we take the time to be thankful for them.
And because we do not value them we have allowed these nature-given gifts to be taken from us almost entirely.
We pay for water, we pay for shelter, we pay for food and if somebody could find a way to do it they would make us pay for air.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this, we trade our time for money so we no longer need to find and collect water, hunt wild game or forage for food.
But because of this exchange we have lost control of the things that are truly most valuable we give no thought to the quality of our air unless it is so putrid that we cannot breathe it, we turn on the tap and clean cool water pours out, our supermarkets are an Aladdin’s cave of wonders and they are all owned and controlled by somebody else.
This is how we tolerate the pollution of rivers, the endless pursuit of more and more energy and the destruction it causes, we fail to see the connections between the food we eat and the lives of battery farmed animals, because we don’t see it and we don’t make the connection.
If you collected water from the stream each day you would notice immediately if it was bad, you wouldn’t dream of discarding your rubbish into it.
If you collected your own food and hunted your own game you would notice the lack of rain, the changes in the seasons, the falling numbers of insects and animals.
We are disconnected and so we don’t see it, until it is so obvious that we cannot ignore it, like Mac in the California sun, we only value the essentials of life when we are deprived of them.
Don’t feel bad about it, it’s not your fault, it wasn’t a conscious choice, we grew into this way of living over 200 years or more, it seemed like progress, and it was, but our easy life has had serious consequences.
The good news is that we can change this very easily by paying attention and by playing Only Connect.
We can notice our connection to our breath, circulating a constant stream of life giving oxygen minute by minute, the first thing we do when we enter life and the last we do when we leave it.
We can take the briefest of moments to give thanks to that glass of pure life-giving water, we can make the connection to the rivers and lakes, the rain and the dew.
We can be be thankful for our homes, for warmth and shelter, we can connect the power stations, the windfarms and the building plots to our need for shelter and fire and insist that it is done well.
We can make the connection between the food on our plates and that chicken or pig that lived and died, for you to eat, how did it live, how did it die? Was it done well? Was it done with care and gratitude?
Were those potatoes farmed and harvested well?
Were they sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, can we make the connection between that and the loss of bees and butterflies?
Were your vegetables picked by gang labour? Were they irrigated with water that reduced that ancient chalk trout stream to a dribble?
There is a phrase in the Lakota language “Mitakuye Oyasin”, it is usually translated as “all my relations” but I recently heard a much more meaningful explanation from Sal Gencarelle.
“I am who I am because of the connections I have made”
We can choose the connections that we make and each time we pay attention to those connections we make them stronger and when we do that we will start to care again, we will start to remember the things that are truly of value again, if we can Only connect.
Jonny