nature – Anton Martin Smith Writer

Today I was wondering about Kiwis (Sorry you Aussies are relegated to the P.S. section) – I was wondering why we are so reclusive. I came up with this line of thinking:

Why do we NZ’ers not know that our ultra-reclusiveness is something we are deeply hamstrung by? Does this mean we’re stupid as well? Or is it arrogance? Perhaps it is simply a form of entrenched genetic PTSD stemming from our ‘Let’s escape our shitty UK lives’ ancestry. yes – that’s gotta be it!

So this kind of makes me feel better – we are probably all suffering from a heavily entrenched & now genetic level PTSD. It’s not because we are stupid, or arrogant at all. And besides, we are natural ‘Mr Fixits’ – you can’t be stupid & know how to fix everything – so case closed.

So while I feel happy about this – this is still a worry. Becasue while ultra-reclusiveness may help us ‘tinker away happily fixing things in sheds’, it is bad for our mental health to be so insular. This is under the thesis ‘ a problem shared is a problem halved’ thesis. We don’t share our problems – especially males – so our mental problems are relatively doubled compared to the (perhaps only mythical & not actually real) ‘happy problem sharing society’.

Yes we try to get better on this – but I’m not sure we can force ourselves to be better. I think that will only help us perhaps ten to twenty percent. To change 50% we have to somehow change who we are. I don’t know much – but I’m sure that won’t come from talk alone. So the answer must be this:

We need to find a new project to totally enliven us – but what the hell would that be?

I will end here – becasue I don’t have the answer to this problem. Hopefully (to use an overused term) it ‘sparks debate’ & some genius will save us all from our ‘hideaway & tinker syndrome’. But the worry of that course of action we often look for a saviour in all the wrong places. Just look at 20th Century History. in the hope of getting better, we better no get worse.

Good luck to us & all others like us (Eastern Europe?)!

P.s. the Aussies surely have the same ‘Genetic level PTSD’ problem – but they are ultra competitive lot, & can pick on each other rabidly – if that’s a ‘solution’ to their entrenched cultural PTSD then could the solution be worse than the disease? Or am I just dreamin’?.

P.P.S The Aussies are certainly making more money than us – but are they happier? I’m not sure that the truly are. After all – remember your grandparents dictum of it’s not what you earn, it’s what you save….& prices on their side of the ditch are roughly on a par with us (& everywhere else in the western world).

P.P.P.S At least we kiwi’s when stressed can always blindly walk into our back yards that are also giant beautiful nature parks. we defnitely have this over our Aussie cousins as an ‘anti-PTSD pill’.

Cheers Anton Martin Smith

email me at antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com

By Martin Anton Smith martinantonsmith@gmail.com

Right now it is Autumn – or as the yanks say – “fall”.

The other day I looked at a giant pile of wind curated leaves on my front yard.

The thought appeared –

Each leaf has come from a particular tree, from a particular branch, & from a certain sub-branch,

But as I look at the big seemingly homogenous leaf pile – that information is not available to me personally.

The Physics man tells us in that theory you could somehow still “ID” any one of those leaves.

For the total information content of the universe is always preserved.

I thought that it’s pretty cool that there are trillions of seemingly indistinguishable leaves out there but the universe still knows exactly where they came from.

I also was kinda miffed that I’d never be able to find that info – or so I thought.

A couple of days later, most the leaves had fallen – so there were only a couple of hundred of leaves on each tree.

I watched one of them waggle on the tree, & I could even watch it waggle off from its precise location.

That meant when that leaf hit the big pile of its friends below,

I could know exactly where it used to live – which tree which branch which sub-branch it fell from.

A lot of artists say that science ruins the ‘magic’ of the world – I disagree –

I think both of these ‘where did the leaf live’ situations were interesting in their own right.

The real problem these artists who say science ruins ‘the magic of the world’ is they don’t know any science at all.

If they knew just a little about it, they’d see some of the magic in science too.

But I won’t labour the point –

I mean it’s not my place to once again throw the second law of infodynamics into another artists face.

I’ve been doing that far too much lately & I really must cut down on it.

And in closing If you ask someone be they a leaf, an artist, or a man of science

They will all agree that…

….I’ve got to fucking get out more….

But then again….

Is there really anything wrong with leaves falling in a bored man’s head?...

Tag: nature

Musings about our Kiwi (& Aussies) lives. (A Blog post/update)