Tamsin Omond in a book called ‘Do Earth: Healing Strategies for Humankind’ mentions a kind of healing yardstick – a way to live a life of meaning and purpose in our own estimation that is uniquely subjective and most likely not conflated with the accumulation that is a by-product of capitalism.

Tamsin encourages the reader to write a letter from their 80-year-old self- describing what their ideal life looks like. This working backwards from the end point provides the beginnings of a blueprint that we can adhere to, to live a fulfilled life- on our own terms.

The list I compiled myself surprised me- focussing very little on accomplishment and more so on health, vitality, reading and meaningful human connection.

It brings me to reflect on questions around honesty, integrity and a conscious divestment from the ideals we have become bombarded with and therefore inebriated by, cyclically flashed at us from the vestiges of Western imperialism, meritocratic neoliberal dogma and most harmfully- and rooted in 17th C Age of Enlightenment: the rise of the individual.

It’s interesting to note that ideas around winning in life by ‘pulling up your bootstraps’ rarely accommodate the feelers of seismic historical events which have impacted the human story- some populations significantly more perniciously than others.

I am brought to think on American anthropologist Anna Tsing who writes on this- famously theorising the vast networks of a globalised world that come together producing via connecting social interaction- a moment she coins ‘friction’- as opposed to as a widely understood ‘clash’.

Omond’s radical act therefore of imagining and working backwards from a future independently of the forces that have moulded your present provides a way to reconnect with a self-determination that ancient populations were naturally afforded. I reflect on poet and essayist Jane Hirshfield in a stanza in her poem ‘The Weighing’ where she elegantly crystallises this sentiment of making beauty despite the chaos:

“So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance”

The Weighing, Jane Hirschfield

Despite these moment of ‘friction’ we are entangled with, we do have the natural and Divinely ordained agency to forge and live a beautiful life- radically, and intuitively on our own terms. So few are the grains of happiness in a world where the dispossessed and the subaltern lose out, and still we have the agency to transcend reactionism and make the scales balance.

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In reflecting on this I naturally gravitate to ‘The Outsider’, French philosopher and writer Albert Camus’s seminal work. Upon reading the novel I am confronted with conflicted feelings. Although I abhor the grotesque Zionist stance of Camus, I am struck by what we can learn about honesty from the fictional protagonist who happens to be incarcerated for murder.

“Mixing up my words a bit and realising that I sounded ridiculous, I said quickly that it was because of the sun”

The Outsider, Albert Camus

This is the rationale of protagonist and French settler Meursault when he is questioned after killing an Arab man in Algiers.

In Camus, I think on Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ where the murderer becomes at best, an anti-hero of sorts and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ which like ‘The Outsider’ is an absurdist text. For Meursault who is both absurd and an an anti-hero in the sense that he has transcended the social contract, sacrificing his own life at the alter of brutal honesty, I am reflecting, beyond the inhumane immorality of Meursault’s murderous indifference, on what it means to be honest ‘in this time of plague’.

“Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made,”

A Litany in a Time of Plague, Thomas Nashe

I suppose if with Nashe ‘all thing to end are made’, human agency can begin as with Omond at the end. Working retrospectively can equip us with albeit the immorality of it all, – a Meursaultian honesty that is true of our own self defined success…because living and living and living, reader, often begins at the close.

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