The Thing we Forgot to Notice

Before we walk into what happens when the pressures release, I want to stop one more time, and say something I have not quite said yet. It is the thing I had to write the rest of the book to realise I needed to say.

Everything we have walked through is a loss. Hadley's. The dinners. The kitchens. Helen. The birds. The trust. Each piece has been a thing that used to be there and is no longer there, or that used to work and no longer quite works.

This is not an accident of tone. It is the shape of what is happening.

Here is what I think we forgot to notice, which I did not understand until I sat down to write this walk.

The world I grew up in — the ordinary, unremarkable world of the late twentieth century — was not ordinary. It was a specific and unusual arrangement that my generation, and my parents' generation, took entirely for granted.

Peace across the rich world. Cheap energy that powered everything we did. A shared culture that meant strangers mostly understood each other. Functioning institutions that mostly worked. Trusted news that mostly told the truth. Large families. Extended families nearby. Neighbours who knew each other. Shops that stayed open for generations. Birds in the garden. A sense that the future would be more or less like the past, only a little better.

None of this was normal, in the long story of human civilisation. Most of human history has not been this. Most places, most of the time, have been poorer, harder, more violent, more uncertain. The arrangement we took for granted was the specific result of a particular combination — a wealthy post-war West, backed by cheap oil, defended by a large military, underpinned by shared religion and shared stories, sustained by young populations having children the way humans had always had children.

That arrangement is ending. It has been ending for a long time. We have been living through the ending without quite noticing, because the ending is slow and our lives are short.

This is the thing I had to say before we walk further. The pressures we have been describing are not a storm passing through a normal world. They are the end of a particular and unusually good arrangement, and the beginning of something we do not yet know the shape of.

When you understand this, the rest of the walk is different. The pressures are not things going wrong in a world that is otherwise fine.

They are the world, turning.

What lies on the other side of the turn, we do not know. Humans have lived in many arrangements across their history. Some were better than ours. Many were worse. What we are moving towards is not, by any law, either. It depends on what we do between now and there.

This is why I am writing the walk. Not because the turning can be stopped. It cannot. But because what comes after the turning will be shaped by what we practise, and pass on, and carry, through the turning.

We are not living in a normal time. We are living at the end of one, and the beginning of another.

Holding that, clearly, is the first thing.