How many days have you had then?

I was a tad disconcerted recently to come across a website - www.peterrussell.com/age.php - that could calculate for me in a millisecond how many days I’ve been alive. For me, it’s more than 23 thousand days.

Terrifying thought! Of course, not all of those thousands of days have been in any way special. Life just progressed. Chores were done. I turned up at work. I cooked, showered, slept, talked, walked, shopped and drove around. All pretty darned ordinary, really, except for the miracle of being alive at all. We take that for granted usually, unless we’ve survived something that should have or could have killed us. Then life itself becomes stunningly interesting.

Russell (pictured right) has a hugely expansive worldview and is the author of some pretty profound books. I loved his "The Global Brain Awakens". He prefers of think of his life in days rather than years. “I can hold a day’s experience in mind quite easily,” he writes on his site. It’s much harder, he says, to go back and take stock of a whole year. Many incidents and discoveries are inevitably forgotten.

He also finds it more meaningful to think he’s lived through more than 20,000 days, rather than 50-plus years. “And it reframes the future. I have, probably, thousands of days still to come. Thousands new days to discover, enjoy and learn from.”

I don’t quite agree with him. I think we can go back and take stock of events many years after they’ve occurred. But I do agree that life is all about discovering, enjoying, and learning about your existence. Your life, everyone’s life, is unique. It deserves to be noticed and celebrated.

I heard Peter speak at a conference once and was amused by his pointing out of the totally obvious. He was trying to get us to think fresh, think real. He did it by getting us to consider sunset. Humans have been saying sunset (and sunrise) for gazillions of year. After all, the sun does seem to us earthbound citizens to set and rise. But it's a very long time since we've known that actually the sun doesn't go anywhere - it's just that the earth keeps on rotating. But we don't care and just keep on mis-labelling the appearance and disappearance of that bright old light in the sky. Does us good to think about things differently, I reckon.

iPhones and Passings

My friend writer Helen Brown lost her iPhone. Quel bereavement! Because she was on holiday at Byron Bay and was just about to pack up and leave, there was no chance of it turning up under a cushion as might have happened at home.
“No doubt it's jiggling about inside the shorts pocket of a virile surfie,” she wrote in her blog. http://browngentry.livejournal
But then she added, “Living without it is surprisingly liberating. Not being available every second of the day is the definition of 21st century freedom.”
How wedded we’ve become to our gadgets. I’ve just switched over from PC to Mac because everyone I know who owns a Mac just loves it. Adapting is currently doing my head in but I’m beginning to see glimmerings of how good it will be once I’m sorted. And how I will hate to ever lose the thing.
I remember once, in the midst of writing a book, how I refused to leave my laptop in my car at a secluded beach to go for a walk. I had a thousand projected-related emails in that computer and couldn’t bear to think of losing the lot to a smash-and-grab thief. “I’ve got my life on that thing,” I said to my thwarted hiking buddy. She rolled her eyes, obviously thinking how pathetic I was.
This week I was reminded that the important things in life sometimes have nothing to do with technical wizardry.
I was in a hospital emergency room, waiting for a friend to have a health problem seen to.
We chatted with a staff nurse as she set and supervised an IV drip. My friend is also a health professional, so the chat was more open than would normally be the case.
The nurse talked about a dreadful day she’d just had as one of a team working on a young patient who was dying of a sudden and massive internal bleed.
She said how hard the emergency team had worked to save the patient, and how gut-wrenching it had been to lose the life of that stranger.
“Then,” she said casually, “We blessed the room.”
I was amazed. How do you do that, I wanted to know. And how often? Oh, all the time. Do you call in a chaplain? ‘Sometimes,” she said, “if there’s one around. But often we do it ourselves .”
Quietly, without fuss, someone will sprinkle water and maybe say a small prayer to send on the soul and make the space fresh for the next sick or injured body to occupy.
Emergency care is, of course, also a matter of employing high-tech skills and gadgets. But sometimes even the best skills and gadgets can’t work miracles.
How good it is to know that at least some of those highly trained and overstretched workers will spare a moment to do what human beings have always done. That they’ll pause, pay respect and carry out a small, unseen ritual to honour the passing of a life.
We may be wedded to our gizmos in the 21st century, but our humanity still runs deep.
Sitting there, in one of the country’s busiest emergency departments, I was immensely moved.
* I’m running a ‘Story of My Life’ one-day workshop in Auckland on May 9. Your life, with all its drama, deserves to be written about. Remember, no life is ever ordinary. For more info check out www.storyofmylife.co.nz

Orcas in the pen

I saw a Shamu show in 1977. Now that’s a long way back. The place was Sea World San Diego. It was a terrific show, featuring astonishingly large animals in very small pools. The trainers were all very fit, loud and smiley and yelled things like “yee-hah!” a lot. It was like a blue-water rodeo. Our little daughters were thrilled and wanted to take home a stuffed toy Shamu as well. We enjoyed the whole sloshing, glossy, superific experience.
It makes me feel a bit squirmy now. Maybe I’ve just grown up, finally, but now you couldn’t pay me to go to such a show. Last week another Shamu (how many of them have there been, I wonder?) was in disgrace after hauling trainer Dawn Brancheau into the pool, killing her.
Since then we’ve seen people weeping at poolside as the show went on – with the trainers now safely out of reach of those big jaws. If Dawn had been a friend of mine I’ve have shed tears for her too, because it seemed she loved big, bad Shamu and all his other Shamu mates. But it’s the orcas I’m feeling most sorry for.
The UK Independent’s Michael McCarthy wrote an excellent piece (re-run by the NZ Herald) about about why orcas (which are actually big dolphins) should be left alone to run around in their huge natural playground, the world’s oceans. He wrote , “Ending up in Sea World is the orca equivalent of you and me being imprisoned by a lunatic in a cupboard under the stairs.” Right on, Michael.
But of course the sad fact is that humans make a pile of money from locking them up and making them do silly tricks. There are currently 42 in captivity around the world. I guess their presence helps experts get to know them better, so some might justify their capture on ‘scientific research’ grounds. But isn’t that what we deride the Japanese for when they kill Antarctic whales?
Orcas’ survival time, once they’re penned in, is only about four years. In the wild, they can live up to 50 or 60 years. So is it surprising if they get tetchy, stressed and bored? And the trouble is, freeing them all would be enormously expensive. It cost millions for the ‘Free Willy’ campaign, and poor Willy only lasted 18 months when finally let loose, despite lots of care and attention during the transition from pool to ocean.
But we’re all a bit strange, we humans, when it comes to being entertained by other creatures, even other humans. Once, on holiday in Peru, I was ashamed when some of my travel mates insisted that the tour bus stop so they could take pictures of peasants and their donkey ploughing a field. The Peruvians showed enormous grace in obligingly smiling for the cameras. They were given nothing for their time. Then we left them to their subsistence drudgery and rode on in comfort to our next nice lunch.
Not long after that some residents in a swanky Auckland street expressed outrage at the fact that busloads of Asian tourists were slowly cruising past their homes (how dare they!) to take photos of householders trimming roses.
If orcas can talk to each other – and I have no doubt they do, even if we can’t fathom the language – I wonder what they say about us beastly humans?

Gagging for caffeine

I had a grim week this summer. I stopped drinking coffee.
It’s the second time in my life that I’ve gone cold turkey – both times on the advice of naturopaths who told me that coffee is not my friend.
So I knew how tough it was going to be. And this time around was no different from my previous experience. I felt shivery, headachy, utterly out of sorts and yes, there were those sharp leg pains back again.
The emotional tug was worse. I had to look the other way each time I passed my favourite cafes, lest I got lured inside to worship at the espresso machine.
Before, I couldn’t start the day without a plunger of stiff black stuff with breakfast. There also had to be the mid-morning flat white and maybe an afternoon one as well if I was meeting friends. Each time a cup was placed before me I would admire its heady aroma, the richness of the crema and the dinky little pattern on top created by a caring barista.
There was the whole ceremonial ritual of playing with the spoon, stirring, skimming off a little foam, slipping it between your lips. I can't like Starbucks because of the spoon shortage there. A wooden or plastic stick is no substitute. But overall, even Starbucks will do if there's no alternative. A good coffee (or so I believed) makes everything better.
When I stopped and become an outcast, I began to realise how intensely our world is engaged in a coffee culture that did not exist a few short years ago. There’s a cafe on every corner to feed our habit. Mobile vans are on patrol for office and factory workers who can’t cope without double-shot lattes. Portable machines take centre stage at farmers’ markets. Every second person on the street is carrying a cardboard cup with plastic cap. Forests are being felled to make those cups.
We’ve gone as ga-ga over coffee as we have over bottled water.
Petrol outlets are probably making more money from caffeine (and water) than they are from fuel. The weatherbeaten guys who used to check your oil and tyres - ah, in the good old days - are now hunched over steaming machines in the BP shop, looking embarrassed about having to faff around with chocolate powder and sugar tubes.
We are so hooked.
I decided that stopping coffee was like stopping smoking. Smokers convince themselves that having a cigarette calms their nerves, when really all it calms is the desire to have another cigarette. We have to have a coffee to perk us up, when really we just need to have one to make us feel like the last time we had one. We’re addicted.
At least lattes don’t give you cancer. At least not as far as we know. But surely when it hurts to give something up, it can’t be doing you much good.
So at breakfast now, I drink green tea. But being healthy can’t last for long. I’m back onto flat whites. Just once a day. Damn, it’s good.

A new decade flies in

It seems like such a short time ago that we were all hyped up over the end of the 90s. The new millennium was coming! A brave new age! That is, if we could get over the spectre of Y2K and all the world’s computers crashing and dying. How quaint it all was.
So where were you on that fateful New Year’s Eve? I stood on the balcony of a little apartment we then had in Auckland, trying to spot the fireworks display through the murk. It rained and rained and rained.
Then I went to Okahu Bay to watch a fleet of Maori canoes welcome in the dawn. Had to park miles away. Sat on the beach with friends. The day dawned a bit pallid and dull. We were all exhausted by then. Trudged back to the car, went home, slept, got up – and the world went on.
A lot has happened since those celebrations around the globe, much of it nasty and bewildering. TIME magazine recently declared it a ‘toxic decade’. And suddenly this first decade of the 21st century has almost gone. We’re all ten years older. We’ve either leapt or been dragged into the digital world, which continues to spin ever faster.
Time itself seems to spin faster – and not just because we’re getting older. There’s so much going on that your brain hurts.
I recall, a decade ago, having conversations about what we would call this decade, for the ‘zero’ years did not make for easy contractions like seventies, eighties and nineties.
Some reckoned we’d label them the noughties, but that hasn’t really happened yet. Instead, we just talk about, for instance, 05 or 06. And soon we’ll be referring to 2-10 and 2-11, booting the middle zero out of the way. Or maybe we’ll say twenty-ten or twenty-11. Whatever, the next lot of numbers is roaring down the freeway at us.
In the last decade, TVs grew skinny while people grew large; we talked less and texted more; financial bubbles grew and burst; the web went more viral; gossip grew more global; and mankind kept on chopping down rain forests and firing guns at each other.
So what’s likely to happen next? Who knows. But here are ten little expectations from me. I reckon we’ll see:
1 MORE DRAMA over climate change, and also more talk about limiting the number of people on the planet. Expect to hear from groups pushing a ‘Stop At Two’ agenda.
2. MORE ANGST about geopolitics. So what’s new!? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan (which is now apparently being tagged ‘Afpak’ in strategic-thinking circles), Israel, Palestine: all such a mess.
3. MORE RUSH and excitement about bright sparks inventing clever new things to improve our lives. Today’s young people, who’ve grown up with computers, will produce marvels the world has never seen before.
4. MORE APPRECIATION of old-fashioned values like friendship, caring, community spirit. With so much going on in the digital world, human interaction will be all the more valued and yearned for.
5. MORE SOCIAL NETWORKING and digital media to both delight us and baffle us until we get the hang of it. Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr; Ning, Bing and Jing – they may sound like Santa’s reindeer but there are hundreds of sites and tools to discover and use.
6. MORE NEED (as a consequence of the point above) to pay attention to body maintenance – with better eating, exercise and de-stressing activities to balance up this stressful world.
7. MORE ADDICTION to the things we use to get away from it all – such as iTunes and You Tube and mountains of pills and liquids, including those endless cups of coffee – the stimulating drug that so many of us simply can’t do without.
8. MORE ADMIRATION of truth, honesty, compassion and moral magnificence.
9. MORE MAGNIFICENCE in performing and visual arts. We don’t want everything brought to us on-screen. It’s glorious to see real live people producing sights and sounds that makes the heart sing.
10. MORE YEARNING for simplicity. Life is now so very complex that it’s the small things we’ll love even more: summer sand beneath our feet; the sound of birds, waves and rippling streams; hugs from loved ones; artless prattle from small children; smiles from strangers; and beautiful, useful things made by hand.
Happy Christmas, all.

Night Horrors

Are we witnessing the decline and fall of our civilization? Sometimes, when I look at TV, I think so.
Slowly, subtly – and not so subtly – the box has become a very scary place to spend time with. Oddly, most of the truly awful stuff comes from England. It’s an strange state of affairs considering that for years we idolised the UK’s quality dramas. They’re still there. I hear, for instance, that the recently screened Bleak House was great.
But most British fare is now pretty yucky. I couldn’t believe my eyes a week or two ago when I stumbled over something on Prime called Three Fat Brides and One Thin Dress. The idea of this ‘reality’ show is for three chubby women to diet furiously in the hope of squeezing themselves into a strapless, bejewelled slip of a gown fit for a princess. This show is really just another version of Cinderella, only there’s no need now for Cinders to be sweet or brave or long-suffering, but merely to be skinny.
We’ve seen lots of dieting on the telly, but this was the first time I’d seen the judge demand that participants bring along a fecal sample for discussion. The judge is, naturally, blonde and skinny and issues her orders like a trainer calling sheep dogs to heel.
‘Whose poo is this?’ she shrieked, picking up a plastic lidded box with a dark turd inside. A chart on the wall behind her indicated the look and shape of the perfect poo. Smooth and snake-like is how they’re supposed to be, apparently.
One of the brides-to-be confessed shamefacedly that in fact the lumpy offering had been produced by her fiancé, Gareth. Judge Lady thought as much. With an expression of disgust she lifted the lid and snapped it shut again. ‘It stinks!’ she shrilled, outraged that the bride-to-be had been too shy to produce a sample which might somehow have been more fragrant.
I could barely believe that this was going on in my living room. But still, I shouldn’t have been surprised as evening TV is now largely a swamp of nightly murder, mayhem and gooey forensics as floods of crime shows swallow up prime time.
Some nights I switch instead to the History Channel (uh-oh, soldiers being machine-gunned); Animal Planet (crikey dick, another animal-cruelty show); E! (how many Botoxed starlets can there be in the world?); the Documentary Channel (oops, it’s Fat Doctor with surgeons up to their elbows inside the torsos of the super-obese); and Fox News, where all the gals look like ex-Miss Americas and most of the men seem to hate Democrats.
And yet, every now and again, something wonderful shimmers on the screen. Just today I caught a brief documentary on Al Jazeera about South Africa’s Miagi Youth Orchestra, a classical-music ensemble of young and hugely talented players from right across the race and income spectrum. I watched a slender black boy lost in the magic of wringing music from his viola, his whole body trembling with the sound and passion of it, his face glowing with the pleasure and power of creating beauty. Aah, sometimes, even now, it’s really worth sitting down in front of the telly.

Green shoots you can believe in

We keep on reading about ‘green shoots’ of recovery as the world struggles out of recession. Some of them seem a bit illusory, but seeing real green shoots does your heart good.

I was in Melbourne last month, catching up with my old friend Mary, who took me, appropriately enough, to Marysville. The name sounds familiar? It should, because it was one of the country towns almost wiped out in Victoria’s terrible black Saturday fires last February. Thirty-three of its citizens died.

The disaster scene is still a surreal sight. You drive the winding road through miles and miles of blackened trees, along that stretch where, in the midst of hot panic, some people perished in their cars as they fled, blinded by the smoke, overwhelmed by the speed of the flames.

Now you can stop along that road, get out and listen...to total silence. All these months later, the stink of burning still drifts through the darkened forest. If you touch the black charcoal that coats a roadside trunk, it feels as fragile and brittle as the top of a burnt pavlova cake.

The town is a sad sight. There are just a few remaining shops and a grid of empty streets with blank spaces laid bare where bulldozers have been in and scraped ruined houses away. Oddly, there are some undamaged wooden signs still hanging between posts where front fences or hedges must have been, advertising the rates for cosy weekend accommodation in cottages that no longer exist.

But there are signs of new life. A big marquee fills the space where a hotel once stood, with two temporary cafes inside offering food and coffee. Workers in orange vests are busy as re-building gets under way around the village.

And the marvellous thing is that all the tall black tree trunks in the forest are just beginning now to shed charcoal-coated bark to reveal bright, fresh, healthy timber. Springing from the vertical trunks are clumps of beautiful, bright green tiny leaves, like explosions of green feather dusters. Some of the trees, from a distance, look to be sporting a coat of green down, like new feathers on the skin of a baby bird. Tree ferns too, have somehow survived and are sprouting elegant new fronds.

And as spring arrives in Marysville, daffodils are blooming – dots of sunny yellow in otherwise empty gardens. Of course, when the fires roared over and scorched the land any bulbs still tucked underground from previous years slept safely on, untouched by the heat, ready to do their thing next time Nature sent out whatever subtle signal it is that motivates a daffodil to stand up and sing. So there they are, blooming like crazy, semaphoring hope.