Perspective

I have just finished reading an amazing book by Madeleine Bunting called ‘Love of Country’ based around her travels in the Hebrides. Very near the end she talks of two of her children crossing the Atlantic by air to attend a wedding, at the moment when she lay near the beach reflecting on her day. She thought of them cramped in airline seats, watching films, eating tiny containers of airline food, perhaps catching a glimpse of the ocean below but not giving it a thought. She follows this by saying “in our flattening and shrinking of our world we have short-changed ourselves, and reduced our capacity for wonder rather than cultivated it.” It was at this point that her words struck home further, adding to the sense that our perspective on our world can so often be wrong. She said she was acutely aware that her children’s well-being and safety was entirely dependent on thousands of people whose names she would never know, on the millions of small decisions and interactions of millions of other human beings, such as baggage handlers, airport security, air-traffic control, cooks, cleaners, taxi drivers. In other words they lived, and we live, in the trust of others. She concludes with a quote from the American philosopher William James: “On the pilgrimage route, as in life, all we can do is trust.”

At this point of Covid-19 crisis she highlights two very relevant points. One is that we have lost much of the perspective that we need. Our current situation has highlighted how interconnected our world is and how much we rely on people far and wide, but along with that we can so easily become people who lose sight of the things that are right in front of us. Being cooped up, as we are, under isolation, unless deemed essential to our process to come through this, we are forced to confront our very local situation. We are surrounded by objects, views and people that are very close. We are forced to notice more of the local because we can no longer connect ‘far and wide’. Yesterday we collected a fruit and veg parcel from a local farmer whilst taking the opportunity for our one bit of daily exercise. The reliance on the local producer may well come more to the forefront in the coming days. Perspective is changing.

The backyard – looking less than beautiful but full – with acer, clematis, strawberries, tayberries, gooseberries, vine, chive raspberry if we look closely. What might be in your garden with minimal effort?

The second issue is one of trust. In many ways we have lost this vital quality in our nation as we constantly monitor and assess. Everyone has someone breathing down their necks to check that they are doing things as they should. I am very comfortable with a balanced approach to accountability but it has become increasingly obvious that teachers, the medical profession, social workers and even parents are being watched and monitored to the extent that any training they previously received to give them confidence that they can be the teachers, nurses and so on that they wish to be, is undermined by a sense that maybe they are not up to the task.

Into this our current crisis is forcing us to trust again; to trust doctors, to trust nurses, to trust teachers, and even that, to a large degree, Boris is forced to trust the advisors in medicine and science that he has on each side of him. My real hope from all this, apart from all that I feel needs to be said into the spiritual context in terms of hope and an eternal future, let alone into the practical and pastoral needs of people in the here and now, where hope must be engendered, is that perspective on the ‘local’ and trust in our professions need to reinstated as paramount if we are to learn from our current circumstances.