About

I’ve often thought that going flat out is something to be avoided.  I usually freewheeled down hills as a kid with one eye (and hand) on the brake, eager to enjoy the trip, but not to get so carried away with the now as to be unaware of what was around the corner, back then in a very literal sense.  Perhaps I have always been risk averse.

The recent crisis in the financial markets is, to my mind, a similar thing.  Living for today, at 100mph, taking whatever can be taken, without thinking of the consequences has plunged the global economy into meltdown.  And yet, it’s exactly this kind of hedonistic approach that has also led to the environmental  turmoil that remains as big a threat, if not a bigger one, than the economic and social woes we are currently living through.

In fact, non-consequential thinking, is responsible for a lot of heartache – short-term decisions are often more selfish those taken with a longer timeframe in mind, considering immediate benefit at the expense of future implication is dangerous.  Of course, to suggest that we don’t take any pleasure or enjoyment from the now would lean ironically towards the Protestant work ethic cited as as the very catalyst of our current system of speculative capitalism, and I wouldn’t want to go there either.

Rather, I’d like to find that elusive balance where we can enjoy today, without it costing us tomorrow.  Where we can rest easy that there will be a tomorrow, without sacrificing our today.  Things rank and gross in nature may currently possess our unweeded garden but we don’t have the option of razing it to the ground and starting afresh.  No melting, thawing or resolving into dew will bring us out of the current predicaments.  Instead, we have to find the balance that works for us in every social context from that of global warming to more prosaic and human sized issues.

They won’t be solved here, but An Unweeded Garden can hopefully be somewhere where they can be discussed.