Get Busy Living

‘Worry a little every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple
of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself
not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.’ – Mary Hemingway
A few years ago, I wrote an article for another publication about the
problem of ‘psychic distance’ – or, to say it in English, the fact that in
the modern world, we are always several steps removed from everything
essential to sustaining our lives and do very little for ourselves.
This concept comes from the philosopher John Lachs – not to be confused
with John Locke – who wrote a book called Intermediate Man. If you give it much
thought, you’ll quickly realise that without the whole infrastructure that surrounds you – the
ATM, Mastercard, British Gas, Sainsbury’s, and so on – you would probably be unable to
survive for very long, and however long you did live, you’d almost certainly be cold, hungry
and miserable. Our food comes in boxes and tins and plastic wrap. Clean water comes
from the tap. Heat, hot water and gas for the cooker come from . . . somewhere. You see
where I’m going with this.
At university, my first roommate was a girl who longed to live off the land – to ‘kill my
own food’ as she put it. She worried a lot about everything, including the possibility that
the world was in fact a giant insect and all the trees were its hairs. I often laughed at her
– but as I’ve grown older, I’ve been forced to admit she had a point in her desire to be
self-sufficient. If left to my own devices, alone in the forest, I would not only have no idea
how to go about killing my food, but if, by some freak accident I did manage to kill, say, a
squirrel, I’d have no idea how to proceed with the eating part, and would probably end up
burying the poor thing under a makeshift memorial fashioned of pinecones and wild flowers.
When I wrote the article I mentioned earlier, I’d been thinking about all this perhaps too
much. I was freaking out. ‘I do not know how to make fire!’ I wrote, as a sort of repeating
motif throughout the piece.
Not long after, it was either Christmas or my birthday, and, as one of my gifts, my
father gave me a small box. Inside was a tiny red folding knife, a block of magnesium
and a note which read, ‘Dear Becky, Now you’ll be able to make fire. Love, Dad.’ What
you do is use the knife to scrape a small pile of magnesium shavings. Then you strike the
knife against an attached piece of metal to produce a spark, igniting the magnesium. It
burns at much higher temperatures than other materials, and provided you have something
with which to feed the flame (sticks, branches) you can get a strong fire going. I
keep both the knife and the block of magnesium on my key chain, along with my bicycle
lock combination and my miniature Borders reward card. In the event of catastrophe, I’ll
be able to build a fire, lock up my bicycle and pick up some good reading material,
making certain not to lose out on those valuable reward points. . . .
But mostly I keep the knife and magnesium close because they are a visual reminder
of an important truth: there are solutions. Rather than worrying,
we’d be wise to seek answers to help us put our minds at ease
and get busy living!