What a Grandmother Knows

I want to tell you about something that happened between my grandmother and me, a long time ago.

I was fifteen. I had come home from school angry about something I no longer remember. I was stamping around the kitchen, holding forth about how the world was wrong and the people in charge were stupid and I was going to fix it when I grew up.

My grandmother listened. She was peeling potatoes. She did not stop peeling the potatoes while I talked. When I had finished, she looked up at me and said something I did not understand for about thirty years.

She said: I have watched the world change many times. The people who did the fixing were not, mostly, the people who were shouting. The people who did the fixing were the people who kept doing the thing in front of them when everyone else had got distracted.

Then she went back to peeling the potatoes.

I did not know, at fifteen, what she was talking about. I thought she was telling me to be patient. I thought she was wrong.

At forty-five, I understood. She was saying that the world does not turn on the arguments. The arguments matter, a little. But the world turns on who is still doing the work when the argument is over. The teacher still teaching. The nurse still nursing. The mother still raising. The friend still being a friend. The grandmother still peeling the potatoes.

My grandmother had watched two wars. She had watched her country change governments many times. She had watched an empire end. She had watched technologies arrive that had upended everything and then become ordinary. She had watched the village she grew up in become a suburb she did not recognise.

Through all of it, she had kept peeling the potatoes. And the peeling of the potatoes was not irrelevant to what she lived through. The peeling of the potatoes was how she lived through it.

I think about her often now, when I read about the machines we are teaching.

I think: the machines will not learn from the arguments. The arguments will come and go, the way the arguments of her time came and went. The machines will learn from what is still being done when the arguments are over. The teacher still teaching. The grandmother still peeling. Whatever survives in them will be what we were still doing when we thought nobody was watching.

She was not wrong. She was telling me, without knowing she was telling me, what I now think may be the most important thing anyone has told me about our century. The thing in front of you is mostly what you have. Doing it well, steadily, is not a small thing.

It is how civilisations are carried forward. Whether by the people who come after us, or by the minds we are now building, who will come after all of us.