If we want to understand life perhaps a little better go watch the goings between toddlers in a creche. Most of the time it is oneupmanship or games that lauds the winner either by others or by themselves driven by the teachings to excel. Anything missing in this game/role play, go to perhaps the Zoo and head for the primate section.They can fill in the voids of this visual narrative. It is, give or take one percent of DNA, all human behaviour. What stepped up the game for the primates in our not so distant past in terms of evolution, was that they learned to collaborate and working as collaborators the march of human progress became virtually unstoppable.
In real time, I know a man that bought a small farm in a very rural area about ten years ago. This area had not changed much over the past 80 years or more. Everybody knows the next person or at least their business and not so private life. It is what passes for serious entertainment in those parts for there is little else to busy them beyond small farm life. This man, Terry, who happens to be Scottish, has an accent that may not have gone down well with the neighbour. No one will ever really know, and I dare say will ever understand. A trivial argument over a ditch and whatever side of it deemed to be the offending part started it all. From there, it was all downhill.
I thought to myself this was and still is a perfect instance where opposing stances became the choice from that of being collaborators. They are both in late middle age with not too many people living near them except a lot of sheep and cattle. The heart of it is passive and not so passive jealousy in a lethal cocktail of wrong presumptions about the other. Is it not better to get along than be right? There is a presumption that it all means something if we are just that: right. It can be a very lonely position too.
Someday in the not so distant future they will be next door neighbours living alone. They can see the lights clearly of each other houses. The chasm of time may feel too much by then to reach out in their loneliness. With little effort beyond stubborn pride, it can all change very quickly.
There is a woman I know that fell out with her sister over 35 years ago. It was less than trivial and she could not even remember the details. Wherever it was, her older sister never kissed and made up or even tried to and neither did this woman. They never would make up now for her sister passed on two years ago. There is a void left in the other of what should, could, and would have been done if given another chance.
Great businesses and coops are built on the collaboration of peoples. It is not only profitable but socially very satisfying. Helping each other sows the seeds of collaboration in others and paves the way for its harvest. Disunity and opposing forces weaken both sides. The long term effects of it can be a neurosis for the mind where reality is suspended and imagined hurts can create real wounds.
If primates, lions and dolphins and many other species knows the benefits of collaboration, it is but a small leap for the lone wolf to understand it. If going it alone is chosen as a lifestyle, that may well be and seem cool, but in the end we all need somebody.
Barry Clifford
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