URSABLOG: Grammar School

It’s probably not the greatest way to start the day, but like many people I use my mobile phone as an alarm clock, and as soon as it goes off I see the texts and news updates received overnight. If it’s a message about work, I will rise from warm and enveloping sheets immediately. My reaction to the news is another matter: sometimes it makes me sit up in alarm or confusion, other times I simply turn over again in an attempt to recapture sleep, trying to make the world go away for a little while longer. Some recent mornings I have been afraid to even look at my phone, uncertain of what I might find.

Reality is changing at an alarming pace, and it’s hard to keep up. New normals arrive thick and fast, and it’s becoming impossible to process them in one go. I feel a bit like Alice, through the looking glass:

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Perhaps I just need practice too.

I am surely not alone in being so disconcerted, disquieted these days. The world has been so, well, solid and set in stone for so much of my adult life that when new and radical ideas are pushed into the world at such an alarming rate, and then acted on, or vice versa, it puts me in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

Sometimes, naturally enough, I wish I was younger, and had been born after 1990, and had no first-hand experience of what life was like before the end of history. Other times I wish I had been around as an adult in the Thirties and Forties – and survived them – to understand better the tumultuous times that led to the Second World War, and what happened afterwards. What was it like to live in those times? What was it like to be a sentient human being while all that was going on?

But I am the age I am, and living in the world today. I find myself reluctant to make ethical or moral judgements, but also find it hard to explain – to myself and to others – why I resist being more vocal. It seems I am expected to be outraged – or exultant – at every twist and turn of events as they unfold. But apart from the fact that it is not only distracting but exhausting to be so engaged, I suspect that constantly jumping to conclusions will reduce any subsequent analysis and action to empty opinions and gestures, backing myself into an inept corner, and unprepared for the next onslaught of events. I also have a sneaking feeling that I have an almost infinite capacity to absorb alarming news equably as long as I am not directly affected.

Last summer, at the end of a warm day, drinking wine in an almost impossibly bucolic vineyard in southwest France, we were discussing the state of the world, and how – through my business, reading, conversations and observations – I was becoming less enamoured with the world of ‘western liberal values.’ I was becoming unsure whether I could trust a system that did not seem to have the means to dispel the ominous clouds I could feel lingering just beyond the horizon.

Challenged by my drinking companions – understandably so – I struggled to articulate what I really felt: a vague and muddled conviction that every country – whatever the received wisdom of the inherent good or evil of their systems – had a legitimate right to exist, and you had to deal with what you found, not what you wanted or hoped it could be.

A principled vocal stand from a distance leads to two dangers. Firstly, because you don’t know how people really live in those places, and how things get done, you take a position mostly in ignorance, however well-meaning you might be. Secondly, if you refuse to engage with people in those countries – in my case doing business with companies, speaking at conferences, lecturing in universities, having simple conversations – you could never even begin to understand or know the nature and the scale, not to mention the revealing nuances, of what is really happening there.

It is, of course, a lot easier to focus our unease by pointing a finger at one person, or a group of people as the ones to blame. Another real danger is that the targets of our ire can easily morph and expand to encompass a party, a government, a society, and eventually, inevitably, a country and all the people blessed and cursed to live there.

If I adopted this attitude I would not be able to even try to understand and appreciate how individual people carry on, live, die, fall in love, create families, and build their futures together in places different to my own. Life goes on everywhere. To label one country as ‘good’ and another one as ‘bad’ is only asking for trouble, and trouble will dutifully answer the call.

And yet my stance feels infuriatingly passive, especially to me. I find myself unable to make witty replies, or curt put downs in real time – I find myself rerunning conversations in my head afterwards, inserting pithy rejoinders or killer conclusions in the places where I was silent – and end up listening in increasing discomfort and frustration. Surely there is something that I could actually be doing?

In my Greek lesson yesterday morning, the following exchange took place:

Q: Η δουλειά σου επηρεάζεται από την διεθνή πολιτική;

A: Ναι, η διεθνής πολιτική επηρεάζει την δουλειά μου.

I will spare you the intricacies of grammatical cases – lost on most native English speakers, and concepts I still struggle to get my head around – but yes, my work is influenced by international politics, and international politics influences my work. The same, it seems, applies to my life as well.

My reluctance to sound off loudly against the troubling times we are in, to point the finger, to blame someone or something is because I am trying to be in the world; trying to make sense of it, orient myself in it. There is not one, perfect, final position that I can take now which will not change in the future: because of the consequences of my actions, or the actions of others to me, or of what I am doing (or what I have done in the past), or of what happens to me as a consequence of other actions. In short, it’s not just up to me, and neither could it ever be: in shipping, in my personal life, or in the world at large. It’s just difficult to express, especially in English.

I appreciate that this doesn’t help much. I am not making a stand that people can immediately understand, admire and even emulate, or dismiss out of hand. I am not offering much reassurance to myself or anyone else. I am not pointing the way to a better or less anxious life. I am not even pointing out what is right or wrong, what is good or evil. I simply don’t know.

Maybe my problem is with language, rather than a lack of certainty or understanding, and consequent action. Am I influencing or being influenced? Did I have a part – however small – in influencing how we have arrived at where we are now? And although it affects me, did I have any influence at all – directly or otherwise – on what is happening now? All of the above could be true – in one way or the other – at the same time, in the same paragraph in fact.

I am seeking a voice that perhaps does not exist in the English language, something that lies between the extremes of the active and the passive that I find so frustrating. I want to be able to speak, and act, and feel that I am inside the conversation, inside the action, and what I say and do affects, benefits, implicates what is going on, not standing to one side of it. This is not passivity, and neither is it innocent. It is certainly not omniscient either. I want to involve myself, and engage in something that will affect me, that will change me.

Big words. I have found that I tend to write ahead of how I intend to live. My writing in a way prophesises, or at best shows what I want to be doing in the future, in an ideal world, all other things being equal. But we do not live in an ideal world, and all other things are not equal. And talk is cheap. In the meantime I will continue working on the grammar of my life.

Simon Ward