Dialogue: We've lost sight of life's simple things

One of my colleagues, confronted this week with a work problem that seemed insurmountable, took himself off for a walk. For half an hour or so he strolled the Auckland waterfront, emptying his mind of the tasks at hand by filling it with the images that surrounded him.

He watched the sun sparkling on the harbour, the tugs, ferries and fishing boats, the yachts and powerboats busily carving furrows in the water, the seagulls and pigeons, the cargo ships, container cranes and straddle carriers, and the people - of all colours, shapes, sizes and ages - going about their lawful (and some probably unlawful) occasions.

When he came back to the office, not only was the answer to his dilemma quite settled in his mind, but he had come to a realisation. "One of our problems," he declaimed as he described his short outing, "is that we've lost touch with the simple things of life."

At the time I was preparing the page opposite for yesterday's issue and had before me on my computer screen these words in a letter to the editor: "But who is doing the cover-up for the anti-social pressures that are ripping up the very fabric of our society? It is not the Government social services, educational institutions or church organisations that are moulding the values of our modern society. It is the mass entertainment industry - the television and film producers and advertising agencies who are the new 'dictators' ...

"They are responsible for imposing their pseudo-values of a violent 'underworld' culture on their captive viewers ... So why do we wonder at child abuse when for hours every day almost the whole population is being assaulted by a savage electronic culture?"

The connection between the words of my boss and the words of the letter-writer struck me quite forcibly, for indeed many of us - particularly those of us who live in this sprawling metropolis - have in this electronic age lost sight of the simple things of life.

And with that we have also lost the sense of where we as humans fit into the scheme of things in this country, blessed as it is more richly than most by a prolific and generous nature.

We seem to spend much of our leisure glued to our televisions, our computer screens, our PlayStations and Gameboys, or ensconced in shopping malls, movie theatres, video game parlours, casinos, pubs, cafes and restaurants; and all of our working lives trapped in our cars and our office buildings.

And all the time out there, not far from our urban fringes, is a veritable paradise of natural phenomena, of richly productive farmland, of animal, bird and plant life, of wide open spaces on which the dollar-drunk eyes of land developers and subdividers haven't settled - to all of which we are intimately connected, whether we like it or not.

I wonder if our loss of contact with the natural world we live in - confined as we let ourselves be to the artificial environment that all big cities by their very nature become - hasn't contributed to a significant degree to our sense of ill-being as a society and to the sense of lostness that seems to afflict so many of our children and young people.

I remember my own childhood - long before the electronic revolution, even television - which was filled with the simple delights of exploration, from netting tadpoles in the local creeks as a child to hunting rabbits in the hills of Central Otago and deer in the mountains of Fiordland as a young man.

I could tell you the difference between a Hereford and an Aberdeen Angus, a Jersey and a Friesian, a Romney and a Southdown. I could recognise clover and fescue, shear a sheep or milk a cow, tie on a fly and catch a trout, drive a tractor. I knew that if you found a farm gate either open or closed, you left it that way; and many a time stopped the car to walk into a paddock to help a cast ewe to her feet.

I swam in lakes and rivers, dams and the sea, searched for crabs under rocks and toheroa under the sand, could clean a fish and skin and gut a rabbit, knew where to find and watch birds'-nests and how to feed hens and open oysters.

And all this was as natural and normal to me as living in a city, going to school, sitting in church, listening to the radio, attending a movie or preening for the Saturday night hop.

In the world I lived in, I was part of a whole and intuitively knew that I had a legitimate place in it. In spite of having lived 30 years in Auckland, I have rarely lost that sense of belonging.

What I seem to have mislaid is my sense of wonder and joy at the simple things of life. Now that spring is about to be sprung I might jump in the car and go look for it.

garthgeorge@herald.co.nz