Well, it appears I have done it again. I have succumbed to saying I would do one thing, and then not followed through on it. I promised I would be posting more regularly, a promise I had made before, and then…I failed to keep my promise. I am continually telling my children how important it is to keep your word. If you say you are going to do it, then you need to do it.
Yet I cannot seem to keep my virtual promises. And perhaps other promises as well. Hypocrite much?
I have kept my promises to myself about reading, however. And I finally read one book which I have had on my radar for a few years, The Way Home: Tales From a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle. It turned out to be one of the best books I’ve read in years.
Mark Boyle is an unknown person to me, but from what I can tell, he is something of a celebrity among the Progressive left for his views on money and the environment. The book is his story of leaving everything we have adopted in the last 30-40 years behind and living without electricity or technology in any modern sense. While I am not someone who will abandon technology, there were many of his decisions which I both understood and agreed with. His perspective on social media (that it is one of, if not the most, destructive force to our current global society), the tremendous negative consequences to smart phone usage (not just social but also environmental), the consumerist mentality towards all things, and the honest lack of regard for the environment by all factions, including those on the left who consider themselves to be “green” and pursuing “sustainability.” Boyle ran an organic grocery store in Scotland and talked about how there were blackberries growing more naturally than anything they purchased along the sidewalks towards the store but it was illegal to pick those. Meanwhile, in their leftist and progressive store where they pushed organic, green and sustainability, they purchased organic blackberries from agribusiness farms in Spain, had them shipped to their store and sold in plastic containers. It was an epiphany moment for him where he realized he wasn’t really doing anything other than make himself feel good about himself.
One thing, in two ways, stood out to me as being best about the book: the author himself. Firstly, he had the courage, which I definitely lack and I suspect most people do, to actually live out his convictions. For example, he was a vegetarian who, once he began to be as close to “one” with nature as he could get, realized that being a vegetarian was unnatural. And so he began by eating roadkill (quite an interesting chapter) and from there moved on to eating meat: but only fish he can catch, the deer he can hunt, or roadkill that is still fresh.
In addition to having the courage to live out his convictions, he seems to possess great empathy towards those with whom he disagrees. Perhaps it is because he is in the extreme minority by living without money and entirely off the land that he realizes he could hate everyone or empathize with everyone, I don’t know, but I was struck by the fact that I have no doubt he and I could share some beer in a pub, and get along splendidly. He constantly demonstrated that empathy by defending the viewpoints of those with whom he disagreed. In one part of the book, when he was talking about doing the laundry which he did by hand using his own soap he made by hand, he discussed how he could understand why a mother of 6 children would not only never want to give up her washing machine but as a result, most likely disagree wholeheartedly with his lifestyle.
The ability to empathize, to see other people as human beings and seek to understand why they feel they way they do without writing them off or disliking them, is almost as much of a lost art as is the ability to make soap by hand. In our day in age it seems to me like most people would rather convince someone they are right or wrong than make or keep a friend. For some reason, telling others that I feel like I can be friends with someone no matter who they support politically is an act that makes others angry. I’m not writing that as conjecture but as a simple statement of experiential truth.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Ireland, there is a man who feels that our political, economic and technological system is destroying the earth. For him, it is such a matter of life and death that he has walked away from it all because he cannot be a part of it. But he hates the system, not the people who are in it. Indeed, he understands them and from stories in the book, enjoys grabbing a pint with them at the pub.
Perhaps that is because he is at peace with hypocrisy. When I was a pastor, and therefore a spokesperson for Christianity (whether I wanted to be or not), I was often challenged to explain the behavior of Christians. Most frequently, the question was why did they talk about the love of God and do such a bad job of loving their neighbor? There was never an easy response to this and certainly not one anyone would accept. I would try to shift the conversation to the definition of love, but that never (understandably) worked. And so I would try to tell people that just because Christians fail at living out the message doesn’t mean it isn’t a message that should be shared. Which would lead to the charge of hypocrisy and me with nothing really substantial to say afterwards.
In the preface to his book Boyle wrote this: “On top of that, those years taught me that rules have a tendency to set your life up as a game to win, a challenge to overcome, creating the kind of black-and-white scenarios our society leans towards. My life is my life, and it’s prone to the same contradiction, complexity, compromise, confusion and conflict as the next person’s. My ideals are often one step ahead of my ability to fully embody them, and that is no bad thing; in fact, as we will see later on, I wonder if hypocrisy might be the highest ideal of all.”
And so, I’ve done it again. I promised frequent posts but failed to deliver. I have failed to fully embody my goals for how I want to live my life (regular writing for the sake of writing).
But is that necessarily a bad thing?
Three Taverns Brewery 