Category: Short stories

Why I Started Sweating the Small Stuff

For a long time now I have been worrying about saving the world. It sure as heck needs saving, but my attempts at doing so have not made much of an impact. At least from what I see in the daily news.

But then something happened that changed my perspective.

We moved into a new place, surrounded by a forest property. The forest needed attention. Some trees are dying, other parts are being taken over by an aggressive, invasive species, we need more diversity, we need some tracks to make the property more accessible… It felt like another big project: saving the forest. Of course, what it came down to in the end was to just pick something small, and start there. We planted some saplings, we removed some of the invasive trees, we started clearing a track. One little step at the time. And now, just over a year later, we are beginning to see the fruits of our labour. In very small ways the forest is starting to look better, more vibrant, more in balance.

None of the changes we made are really big. And most of the improvements we see are simply nature doing its thing. But the small things we are doing have just enough impact to help nature do so.

So, more and more now, I tend to look for the tiny differences I can make on a daily basis, trusting that the big things will take care of themself. I nudge rather than change things; I support rather than push things; I encourage rather than force things.

I still don’t know if I am saving the world, but I am certainly saving my sanity and gaining a healthy combination of humility, fulfilment and peace of mind.

So, don’t come to me expecting big, world-changing results. But if you have something small, positive and worth doing, I’ll be happy to support you. In whatever little way possible.

Connecting to the Land: finding the stories

A while back I shared that I felt my Country was reclaiming me. One part of that process was reconnecting with Nature. Feeling in touch with and being welcomed by my re-discovered natural environment gave me a feeling of coming home I hadn’t expect to find.

But there is more to this process. There are the stories hidden in the land I am reconnecting to.

For decades I lived in Australia. One of the comments my European relatives and friends frequently made when visiting was that Australia has great natural beauty, but is lacking in history. They see it as a young country, lacking in monumental buildings, historic towns and the occasional ruins of past civilisations. On the surface they are not completely wrong. Compared to other continents, the evidence of long-term human occupation of the land is far less visible. The actual human history of Australia, however, runs much deeper than most of the monuments and archeological sites visited by tourists elsewhere in the world.

How deep that history goes only becomes apparent when one discovers the oral history, art, music and dances performed by Australia’s indigenous people. They tell stories that are 10s of thousands of years old. Their art contains knowledge and insights that has been passed on for hundreds of generations. And, interestingly, instead of being connected to man-made monuments, most of those ancient stories, songs and artworks are intimately connected with the land itself. Every natural feature has its story, it seems, and is, through that story, connected to many other places in the continent. To an indigenous Australian, walking through Country is never just a walk from place A to B; it is simultaneously a walk through the history of their people, a revisiting of landmarks they see as their ancestors, and a re-activation of all the knowledge and learning of the generations that went before. Every step they take is securely anchoring them to Country, telling them in no uncertain terms that this is where they belong.

I came back to The Netherlands thinking I would find plenty of visible history but little of the non-tangible story kind. As it turns out, I was wrong.

Sure, the visible stuff is easier to find. It is in all the travel guides, after all. But the land here is full of stories, too, if you know where to look for them. They are just buried much deeper than in Australia, where there are still people actively keeping them alive.

There is a little lake near our house. It is man-made. Not because people wanted to have a lake, but because they were digging out the peat they needed for fuel to warm their houses. The landscape is dotted with small lakes and waterways, speaking of people burning the soil because there weren’t trees enough around to harvest for firewood.

Some of the lakes are almost perfectly circular, which gives them an even more artificial appearance. But those lakes, called pingos, are actually a natural phenomena, caused by ice and meltwater during the ice ages that covered all of the land here. Put together, the land speaks of the slow forces of erosion and the much faster forces of surface mining, both creating and recreating a very unique landscape.

There are some ancient monuments here, too, from the time people here were hunter-gatherers. Huge boulders are grouped together and capped with even bigger ones to form hill-graves we call “Hunebedden” (dolmen), literally meaning “beds of giants”. Built long before the later farmers of this land arrived from the East, they were incorporated into local legends about the giants that roamed the land in ancient days. Some of those legends became fairy tales, others got incorporated into local lore, and some made it into religious tales of saints and demons battling it out amongst the giant stones.

It is till possible, with some research and a lot of patience, to piece together a tapestry of half-forgotten, half-misremembered storylines that were once the way our ancestors here gave meaning to the landscape around them. Doing so, I find, is another way in which this Country is reclaiming me and weaving me into its very being. The more I stumble across the ancient stories, the easier it becomes for me to not feel strange, separate and alienated but part of everything around me. The more I retell and reconstruct those old narratives while exploring the land, the more I feel I am becoming a participant and caretaker, not just a curious tourist passing through.

On Petulant Kings and Childish Tyrants

I often wonder about humanity’s tendency to choose and follow petulant kings and childish tyrants; not just allowing them to rise to power, but enabling them to commit abhorrent crimes against humanity and destroying whole civilisations, not seldom including their own.

You would think that a tendency to choose bad rulers would, over time, be bred out of our genes. What evolutionary benefit can there be in this penchant for leaders that do more damage than good? Yet, we fall for the same types again and again.

Why? What mechanisms are at play here that not only let those types rise to power but help them grow their power to ridiculous heights, even when their childish and destructive behaviour is clearly visible to any discerning adult?

Since this pattern is so common across civilisations, I suspect it must be encoded deep in our DNA. I can only speculate – since we don’t really know how our DNA encodes our behaviours – that petulant kings and childish tyrants rely on the misapplication of otherwise healthy and necessary instincts.

Humans have deeply ingrained parental instincts, for example, that lead us to want to protect and care for helpless infants. Maybe infantile tyrants trigger that same instinct, in an exaggerated and dysfunctional way, like oversized and unnaturally brightly coloured eggs trigger a fanatical breeding impulse in birds. This could make us want to protect and even cherish an overtly childish and irresponsible leader.

Another pattern I suspect is our instinctual longing for the superhuman parent we lost when we grew up and saw our parents exposed for the frail and flawed human beings we never thought they were. There is something deeply comforting in the belief that our parents are all-knowing and all-powerful. It allows us to be the innocent child, powerless but safe under the protection of beings far superior to us.

Maybe we all still long to be that child, bowing in awe to the will of our superhuman parent. That could explain why we are drawn to individuals that openly and defiantly break laws, rules and social conventions. It would make irresponsible, boastful and arrogant leaders strangely attractive to the inner child we lost in early childhood. It would also explain why kings and tyrants through the ages have always been portrayed as larger-than-life, close to God or Gods, and possessed with magical and mystical powers.

David Graeber and Marshall Shalins in their book “On Kings” argue that we don’t want our kings and rulers to obey the law but to stand above it. A king that is constitutionally limited lacks that superhuman, even supernatural appeal that a ruler that answers to nothing and no-one seems to have. If I see what tyrants historically got away with, and often still do, it could be because of their followers’ need for someone who is truly above all human laws. That could be an echo of what the powerless child saw in its parents before they fell from grace.

The paradoxical combination those two instincts – the drive to protect and cherish our children, triggered by adults that behave like over-sized toddlers and the need for superhuman parent figures, triggered by ruthless individuals openly flaunting laws and conventions – can explain the fanatical devotion and protectiveness paired with unquestioning obedience you so often see destructive tyrants and misbehaving kings surrounded with.

If my suspicions are true, humanity is constantly at risk of being tricked by some of our deepest instincts into admiring, enabling and obeying deeply flawed, psychopathic and destructive individuals. Not because we consciously choose to do so, but because our instincts drive us to it.

So, what can we do about it? Are we doomed to fall for infantile bosses and ridiculous rulers forever?

I certainly hope not. I believe we are more than our instincts. I believe we can train our self-awareness and self-control to recognise and self-correct when our instincts trick us and are being used against us. I also believe we can shape our culture – the shared assumptions, behaviours and stories that our society lays on top of our instincts – to protect us from such abuse and trickery. It does mean we cannot let our culture be dictated by those who want to take advantage of such manipulation. We must, collective, choose to steel ourselves against the abuse of our vulnerable instincts, so we are less inclined to run blindly after rulers that lead us astray.

(Too) Close to the Edge

Some time ago I posted about the kind strangers and unkind systems I encountered when our car broke down rather dramatically in the middle of a fairly busy provincial road. Kind strangers got my wife and I safely home; unkind systems made it very hard for us to regain our mobility. For those wondering where this adventure has left us: today we have been able to pick up a rental car the dealer is lending us – with no costs attached – for the duration of the repairs. So, that part of the mishap has come to a satisfactory conclusion.

For me, however, that is not the end of this incident but rather the beginning of a learning journey. I am always trying to learn from the disruptions and upheavals in my life. Partially to find out what I can do differently in the future to prevent the same things from happening again. But also because retrospective learning is what gives such incidents a meaning beyond merely being annoying, painful or worse. It helps me put things in perspective.

So, talking to the mechanic who is working on my car today, the first thing I asked was if there was anything I could have done differently, either to prevent the car from malfunctioning or to get if safely off the road when it did. He assured me I had done nothing wrong. In fact, when he took the car for a test-drive after resetting the on-board computer and running some diagnostics, the car malfunctioned in exactly the same way, leaving him stranded in the middle of a roundabout. He had to be rescued by his colleagues from angrily honking cars driven by frantically gesticulating drivers. Clearly the car was at fault, not the driver.

So then question became: what exactly is causing the car to play up in this way? Why is it doing this? What part is at fault?

Interestingly enough, the mechanic explained that none of the parts were faulty as such – they all did what they needed to do, pretty much performing according to their design specifications. However, when put together, a few of the components, under very specific circumstance, managed to create a combined spike in electricity. That spike triggered the onboard computer’s safety system shutting everything down to prevent the electronics being fried. In other words: nominally correctly functioning parts could, without any of them actually malfunctioning, cause a sudden collapse of the whole system’s functionality; in fact bringing it to a dramatic mid-journey emergency stop.

To make a long story short (the mechanic and I talked for several hours, while waiting for the rental car to arrive): what was wrong with the car had less to do with its components than with the way they operated together. When more than a few parts came close to their edge-condition, the result could push the combined system over the edge.

So, what does that teach us?

First: none of the parts are to blame. They all did what was expected of them. So, no blame there. Second: the system as a whole had been designed with enough fail-saves to prevent major damage. So, no blame there either.

However, fail-safe isn’t the same as failing safely. I think there is a lot of room for improvement in the way the car stopped functioning. For instance, a manual override of the steering and brake system locks would at least allow the driver to push the car off the road once it had stopped. Perhaps the system could have degraded more gradually and gracefully, giving the driver more time to reach a safe place to stop the car. And I would argue that the warning signals on the dashboard could do with driver-centric redesign as well. Most of the warnings may have been useful for a mechanic trying to diagnose what was wrong but didn’t help me, driving the car as it was breaking down, understand what was going on and how best to respond to that. Just a small example: “inspect braking system” is not a useful instruction when you are going 80kms an hour and your car is suddenly and erratically applying the brakes.

Second: tolerances and redundancies can look wasteful on paper, but can make or break a system under stress. The mechanic and I suspect that some of the components had been under-dimensioned to save costs. While technically within specifications, they didn’t have the extra ‘wriggle room’ to handle various edge cases gracefully.

Finally: complex systems, especially when tightly integrated and full of dependencies become sources of unpredictable exceptions. Our car’s onboard computer is full of rule-based software telling it how to respond to all the predictable exceptions. But rules-based systems are helpless in the face of unpredictable edge-exceeding cases. It should be the designers’ responsibility to a) reduce dependencies between components; b) built in more tolerances and redundancies to improve the system’s ability to recover (or degrade) gracefull from faults that occur; and c) provide an interface that is driver-centric, not car-centric to assist the driver in safely getting the car out of harms’ way when its systems are failing.

I am not blaming the designers, the manufacturer or the mechanics for what happened. Blame doesn’t teach us anything useful. But I do hope somebody somewhere learns from this and applies those lessons to their own situation to get a better outcome than the one I got the other day.

One Fine Day – Now available on Amazon

For all those wondering where my short stories have disappeared to: they are now available in Kindle, Paperback and Hardcover format here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B6RP4K9G/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_4BMMHAHVD22T8VMG4V7G

Go check it out. 16 intriguing stories with handcrafted illustrations by the author himself.