A handful of essentials

What do you need to feel well? What if you were only allowed the actual bare necessities? What would you prioritise for you and your family? After a year and a bit of living through a global pandemic I’m sure we’ve all been reflecting on what does and doesn’t make a big difference to our health and happiness. I find myself pondering on this theme during Mental Health Awareness Week which has given it added prominence.

For me it’s been a mixed bag, as I suspect it has been for many. (I should preface this by saying that I have been very lucky to have had an income throughout the pandemic, albeit reduced whilst on maternity leave). There have been positives to living a slower and quieter life - I’ve been really tuned in to the changing seasons and discovered lots of new walks and places close to home. I’ve been cooking more and spent less money on things I don’t need.

But the restrictions have also amplified how important certain people and pastimes are to me. I’ve really missed my family and oldest friends and cannot wait to get back to a city museum or art gallery, followed by a nice lunch somewhere. I have been fantasizing about one day in the future sitting on a warm Italian piazza with a Spritz 😍 . These it would seem are my bare necessities.

In my interview with the Fun Palace podcast I was encouraged to give advice about how someone might go about writing their own Manifesto of Tiny Commitments. I talked about trying to break your life down into categories of things that matter to you. It has struck me since my last post that these categories are very similar to what Donald Brown identifies as the ‘realms’ of the human condition, which can be used to classify the universal features found in all known societies. He labels them social, cultural, language, behaviour and mind.

I’ve already reflected in my previous post that I find this handful of categories pleasing. I like the idea that all the seeming complexity of the human condition can be reduced down to just a handful of essentials we all have in common. It also reminded me of a couple of other models I’ve come across…

Do you remember Mrs Gren? A strange granny that you encounter relatively early on in science lessons as an acronym to remember the shared features of all living things. I was thinking that one way to reframe humans more powerfully as part of our wider environment, is just that. To model our lives and our needs in the same way we would do any living thing. Certainly these primal features are at the forefront when rearing very small children,.. reproduction less so perhaps!

At the other end of the evolutionary spectrum is the New Economics Foundation’s 5 Ways to Wellbeing, which is very specifically about the lives of 21st Century Western humans. The Centre for Wellbeing at NEF was commissioned by the UK Government’s Foresight programme to develop a set of evidence-based actions that would improve personal wellbeing in individuals. They define wellbeing as two fold - feeling good and functioning well, which serendipitously mirrors my “happy and healthy” thinking to date. Their thorough analysis of existing research found strong evidence for five key actions which positively contribute to an individual’s wellbeing.

• Connect - feeling close to and being valued by other people is a fundamental human need - we are social apes!

• Be active - aside from physical fitness, regular physical activity is associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety across all age groups is also a proven way to delay cognitive decline as you age.

• Take notice - reminding yourself to be present and ‘take notice’ will boost your awareness which leads to better decision-making in line with your sense of self and values and higher gratitude ratings.

• Learn - Lifelong learning and the setting of personal goals, leads to more social interaction, an active life and a greater self-esteem.

• Give - Those individuals who participate more in community life are more likely to rate themselves as happy. Research has shown that committing an act of kindness once a week over a six-week period is associated with an increase in wellbeing.

I really like the simplicity of this model - the language and the fact that it really speaks to small, everyday individual actions. Testament to this research is the fact that it has been embraced by both the public and charity sectors as an accessible model to build into programme planning or to communicate directly with service users. It is also clearly very scalable and subjective, for example, “being active” will look very different from one person to the next

I had wondered whether this might be enough of a scaffold for me and so had a go at trying to map the ‘realms of humanity’ against these five actions. But it felt a bit clumsy. I think I would like categories that are more fundamental to human beings as a species - somewhere between MRS GREN and the 5 ways to Wellbeing. I want something that speaks to the primal nature of young children. It really does feel like raising a small creature quite a lot of the time!

This got me thinking back again to my anthropology degree and the unexpected best part of my course - the practicals in the fossil lab, where we would get to inspect and measure casts of our ancient ancestors. So I thought I’d remind myself of the defining features of our species, Homo sapiens via the Smithsonian’s Human Origins programme. I found this amazing passage on our evolutionary beginnings.

“During a time of dramatic climate change 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. Like other early humans that were living at this time, they gathered and hunted food, and evolved behaviors that helped them respond to the challenges of survival in unstable environments.

As the environment became more unpredictable, bigger brains helped our ancestors survive. They made specialized tools, and used tools to make other tools;... they ate a variety of animal and plant foods; they had control over fire; they lived in shelters; they built broad social networks, sometimes including people they have never even met; they exchanged resources over wide areas; and they created art, music, personal adornment, rituals, and a complex symbolic world.”

Particularly striking for me is the context of an unstable, unpredictable environment as a result of dramatic climate change... just as we find ourselves now, but this time of our own making. This has strengthened my feeling that it is important my approach really strips things down to the bare bones of what it is to be human. Hopefully the benefits to keeping it simple will be two fold; broader relevance and being in tune with the wider environment as ‘just another species’, albeit a unique one.

The Smithsonian group human characteristics in the following ways:

Walking upright; Tools & Food; Bodies; Brains; Social life; Language & Symbols; Humans change the world. Given how much of a small person’s early life is about starting to master these characteristics I feel like there is scope to use them to group resources. I imagine broadening them to include their modern day equivalents. I like the idea that each ‘pebble’ would be grounded in a prehistoric theme. A nod to the very beginning of humans starting to create the world they wanted to live in, picking up stones and starting to shape them. At the moment I am thinking of using equivalent everyday words to provide the themes.

• BODIES & WALKING > MOVING

• TOOLS > MAKING

• FIRE & FOOD > ENERGY

• BRAINS > IDEAS

• SOCIAL LIFE > FAMILY & FRIENDS

• LANGUAGE > WORDS

As a child of the late 80’s early 90s it is pleasing to me how this has all started to sound a bit Captain Planet. I think these categories will cover a lot of ground in terms of the preoccupations of young families and provide a handy scaffold to populate with small climate-friendly activities or behaviours which connect us to the environment and each other. Like Brown’s realms, they will inevitably overlap and still need some further thought in terms of checking that they work. I like the idea of curating the pebbles rather than creating them all from scratch, so making sure this framework is fit for purpose will probably require a bit of back and forth between researching content for the pebbles and seeing how they fit. I have ummed and ahhed about a ‘nature’ category but I think in the end I plan for this to be fundamental to them all rather than standalone.

Is it possible to distil the entirety of the human condition into a handful of essentials which we can shape to be more in tune with our wider ecosystem? I’m still not sure yet, but I am enjoying the adventure of finding out. Onwards!

Image credits: Handful of Pebbles; 5 Ways Infographic; Neanderthal and Girl