It takes a village... to be human?
Sometimes I get this swirling inside of me, a bubbling, like there is a new Truth being birthed. One I already know so deeply and intrinsically, but I just can’t quite communicate it, reduce it, simplify it, into something tangible or graspable.
So I sit in the fog waiting. Waiting to see.
Eventually, it just lands. Like a lightening bolt.
Unlocked.
Hello.
I’ve been waiting for you. This divine clarity.
This message.
I’m visiting my husband’s family over in a beautiful town in a very remote part of Eastern Australia. Which is not the same kind of “remote” we experience in Western Australia. Aka, we’re in the middle of beautiful, scenic nature, rivers, lakes and thousands of hectares of forest, but we’re not 700km from the nearest shopping centre, kind of remote.
My husband grew up here, in this town of about 1,000 people.
Where everyone lived in the same few streets, walking distance from each other. There were only 3-10 kids in each class, in the only school that went from Prep to Grade 12. They knew everyone in town, the butcher, the baker and the candle-stick maker (literally). They shared homemade preserves, fresh-caught fish, jammed at Strum Club on Sundays, laughed over a cuppa in the carpark at an early morning surf-check on swell days, and shared life-long friendships, generation after generation. They built lives together and alongside each other. They had land-lines phones, but they preferred to pop over to their neighbours houses instead (or shout from the back verandah - dinner time!). They don’t lock their doors and they tend to each others gardens when someone goes away. They recycle everything through the community op-shop and when someone has a birthday, the entire town gathers at the Golfie (The Golf Clubhouse) to celebrate with cheap beers.
The kind of archetypical Australian 1950’s community village your parents or grandparents might have been raised in.
A total time-warp.
A village.
With a backdrop of pristine, picturesque nature.
As a visitor, it appears to have hardly changed, even today.
Except people drive a bit more to a few more activities / playdates, etc, and occasionally use cell-phones to call landlines (except when the cell tower is down - which it has been). And there are even few mod cons like a pop-up hipster brewery and coffee vans serving world class matcha over summer.
(Although, I’m sure if you’ve been here for 60+ years you’d have a lot to say on how it’s changed. Because, life, like nature inevitably changes throughout the seasons of time).
I’ve got a few books from my local library with me on holidays —
The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choice.
and
Hold Onto Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers.
Both of these books are similar in the sense they explore our human fundamental conscious, unconscious and primitive behaviours and instincts around the subtle theme of - “how the F&#( have we got here as a society?” - in a sciencey kind of less-judgemental way.
Now, I’m not going to regurgitate these books and their findings (despite being tempted to because they are just so freaking fascinating, so just go read them both yourself please). My husband gets the short end of that stick - having me re-read or re-digest every second sentence I read.
But I’ll share one of the relevant revelations for my own journey:
Humans are quite simple at the core of it —
We all desire safety, connection and belonging (or “orientation”).
At the core of our Being, we are always “attaching” to our North Compass.
We need to know where we’re going and in which direction our world / world view / life / sense of self is oriented.
A traveller, using a compass with two North Points would not get very far.
Obviously.
Both books talk about the evolution of our social, economic and cultural systems and structures to the present day, and how our primitive brains function (or can’t function) with these changes.
“The behavioural equipment of a species may be beautifully suited to life within one environment and lead only to sterility and death in another”, the latter book reads.
Our brains, our way of relating to each other and the world, just cannot thrive or function in modern social and economic structures, no matter how hard we try to progress and advance ourselves, past our own humanness.
We are designed for a simpler life, than the one we have created for ourselves in this current era.
We are designed for a culture and a village of attachment.
After the most enormous journey last year of coming into deep inwardness, stillness, removing all the clutter and releasing all our attachments (even re-exploring without our family / and primary attachments we created within that structure), I found myself in a literal Void.
The Void is a pretty amazing place to be. Nothingness. It’s the space of all possibility.
I’d honestly like to stay as close as possible to this place, this zero point.
The clarity is surreal. Godly.
Its ultimate peace.
Not-wanting, not-longing.
But humans fill up the space. We attach.
We need to, for our orientation and existence.
And more importantly than my own adult experience, my children need it.
They do not need to be in the Void. They are, by nature, already there.
They need to know how to orient themselves in this world. Who their secure, attaching adults are (which means we need to know “who we are” and our “place” in the World). Floating along creates chaos for their inner worlds.
Not just their parents, but they need to know what “grandmas house” looks like, or who the Butcher is (or any farmer / person that sells them food regularly), they need to know who the Librarians are when they visit the library, or their Teachers, or any pillars in their world. What they stand for. What their values and traditions are. What their beliefs are. What their social constructs and interwoven North Compass is.
And without these trusting and meaningful relationships taking precedence as their primary orientation, they will easily start attaching to other North Compasses (like tech or whatever their peers are doing).
They need a whole village of attachment and a community of attachment.
I witness both my daughters constantly trying to organise their worlds into something familiar, repetitive and “oriented”. It’s innate.
All that said, my personal journey to deconstruct over the last year(s) has been absolutely necessary. Zero regrets there.
Most of us are on a wagon we do not even know we’re on. Stopping, stepping off and recalibrating has felt absolutely essential. For our own selves, our children and also for our role in the future direction of the planet.
The irony is, we are from a generation that has had “so much choice” it causes us suffering, yet we have also had almost no choice in the same breath. If you use a smartphone (and the longer and earlier you have had a smartphone) you HAVE been programmed. You are not an entirely pure-thinking, free-willing individual, no matter how many ceremonies you attend.
And I truly believe the only way to reclaim that sovereignty is to switch it off (permanently). Your decade(s) long data profiles - deleted.
From there, you can do the rest of the reclaiming.
Otherwise, the rest feels absolutely in vein to me. A false-worshiping, of sorts.
I feel compelled to share how my 3 year old daughter (who has mostly had a screen-free life), walked into a restaurant / pub here on our travels with a TV blaring. She watched an add for Woolworths, and at the end, after making comment about the lovely looking fruit, she said - “It’s Woolies!” with excitement. Her brain recognised the logo from the supermarket in our hometown (which we don’t really go to). And that shows just how pervasive programming is, at the most primitive level (not even AI tech and algorithms that Social Media / Big Tech use). From birth.
Our brains need to attach - and this can be as a dangerous as it can be helpful.
Particularly in these times.
We have lost our North Compass as a humanity.
We live in what people call the Post-Truth Era.
Nobody (in my generation anyway) knows “their Truth” anymore. Our societies are not united by shared Truths, shared beliefs, shared ceremonies, shared values, shared behaviours and social norms. And on Instagram, everyone is preaching how to reclaim your inner Truth and be your own Truth (yes, that’s it folks, keep seeking, searching, seeking - whilst we sell you some more things, program you a little more, and trust you’ll never truly find what you’re after whilst you’re plugged in to this lovely distraction machine).
So.
Post-deconstruction of Self, I find myself now (very cautiously) deciding how to step back into “my life” and world and what is next for us.
My decisions are being guided (by God and divine guidance), and then my intellect has it’s moment of glory trying to explain it in a coherent and tangible way (enter: Substack publication).
Being here, in this beautiful little town, with family and cousins and long-standing family friends and neighbours, that has resembled the feeling of living and being in a true village, I am reminded that…
After zero, comes 1, after one comes 2.
That we must consciously choose what kind of world we want to orient ourselves to, and what kind of world and life we want our children to orient themselves to.
And how important creating a real, tangible village is in that way.
Now, I have not finished either book yet— and offer no solution for this mad point of our human trajectory (as that’s not the point of these musings).
“This is the way to do it…”.
Sorry. I just come with the lightening bolt of Truth delivered to me.
We need to exist in a real life village.
And I know this is my mission for 2023.
It is essential for our humanness. For our children to know themselves in this world.
And ideally not a transient one, a transient village.
(Note: I live in a very transient town, and know the effects of this well)
Deep traditions, deep sameness, deep belonging and loyalty, deep significance and known-ness.
And consciously choosing what this will look like.
Not just whatever has unfolded due to, essentially, “progress”.
(Including the illusion of digital villages - which have their place, but not in this conversation or as a replacement or substitute for real humanness).
Our times have stripped these very natural and obvious deep assumptions away from us, and past institutions (like schools or organised religion) which used to provide this, no longer do (or still do in some ways, but often to the detriment). We are on our own to re-write (or reconnect to) the threads that weave us together again.
I was first inspired to write this post when reflecting on how the challenges faced by our current generation of young-in’s are not even in the same league as previous generations. In the past, your education played an enormous factor in your well-being, quality of life and “success” in the world. True, it still does in less-developed societies. But we have developed so far in our current modern, western industrialised societies that “access” is no long an issue. Any child can be educated now, from anywhere in the world. You just plug into the Kahn Academy via the App Store. Even a 2 year old can navigate it
We hold all the World’s knowledge in the palm of our hands.
With instantaneous access.
The challenge of today’s generation is remembering how to be human.
Not a machine.
The challenge of today’s parents is not how to balance work and life and provide, acquire wealth, status, and secure a material future for our children and our Selves. But it’s how to simply let our children develop in a normal, healthy, human way - despite the odds against us, of the current social, economical systems of which they’re being raised in.
We have all the privileges that previous generations worked so hard for, afforded to us from before we’re born. But it has advanced us to the point where we have lost the basic foundations of our existence.
The foundations for which our brains, our biology and our social and emotional needs require in order to simply function and develop like a human being.
I repeat: “The behavioural equipment of a species may be beautifully suited to life within one environment and lead only to sterility and death in another”.
After returning to zero to start afresh.
A clean slate.
Now, I must recalibrate my compass of attachment.
My North Pole for my life.
A North Compass that is known and unchanging - and it is suited and relevant to our primitive brains (not some commercialised idea we’ve been sold about “how to have it all”, which has so many feedback loops I would need a whole book on that itself).
Now, of course, it’s possible to live outside of a village.
Many have.
But most didn’t.
When I ponder on almost every problem our humanity is facing on the planet today (from the global scale to the intimate yet mass-pyschological issues plaguing the next generation of children), I can’t help but feel The Village is a crucial missing piece.
Not that we all need to pack up and move to Mallacoota to solve our global and individual-level issues (although, not-gonna-lie, tempted!) — but I feel that we must not ignore this enormous attachment void in our current trajectory.
And I look forward to exploring this deeper, this year.
I feel I still have much more to say on this. Consider this Part 1, of a larger journey.
Stories of Sunyata:
My journey of becoming nothing in a world that expects everything / Rediscovering the Garden of Eden, through Village Living.
Or something like that. I’ll work on it. Insert awkward emoji.
P.S. Doesn’t this place seriously look like the Garden of Eden though? Ironically, that’s the name of the closest major town. (Photo credit: visitmallacoota.com.au).