Little Tin Roof Reflections

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Prior to going, I wondered what we'd learn as we travelled through many different geographies, met all sorts of people and saw a wide variety of plants, animals and nature.
A few days ago, I asked everyone to think about this question and here are their thoughts.

Cas:
- The Western world has gone mad!
Everyone has now got the fundamentals to be happy: a warm house, enough food, a means of transport, a means of communication and entertainment. To get these things, we had to strive to get money. But what we're not recognising is that once we've got them we can stop and spend more time actually enjoying our lives/family/friends. When we've got the fundamentals, a long commute to work or working so hard we don't see our children or are too tired to see our friends, just to buy more stuff, is madness. It's like we've got on this bandwagon which was required initially to get the fundamentals, but we haven't got off it.
We can be just as happy with our friends around a camp fire with a cheap bottle of wine as we can arriving at a fancy restaurant in fancy clothes in a fancy car and having a fancy meal. And we don't need to work all hours to afford the former.

-Children are as happy with a stick and some other children as they are on their own with a hundred toys. This is something that has been lost generally in Western society as we've become frightened about safety.

- The happiest people seem to be those that spend their life within nature.

- All over the world women, rich or poor, are doing the same things: washing clothes, washing pots, cooking food, looking after their children and gossiping in groups.

Bob:
- Happiness is not about how much you own or what you have, it's defined by who you spend time with and what you do as an occupation.

Tom:
- Accept what you have and grateful for what you have.

- Get over the little inconveniences in life because they are really not important.

- The further away from cities, the happier and nicer people appeared to be.

Ed:
- You don't have to have money to be happy. Poor Indonesian people living in mud houses seemed happy.

- You don't have to live in a big house, just have the stuff you need to survive.

- People in the hills around Pokhara seemed happier than the people in the city of Kathmandu.

Hat:
- You can make things by hand and you don't need machines to make everything.

- You don't need money to be happy.

Finally, I have some reflections of my own:
- One of the key things that has impressed me is how every opportunity in nature has been creatively filled by some kind of plant or creature. It's one of Darwin's evolutionary insights and it's has been a marvel to see it in action.

- I was impressed by the ancient Chinese and Buddhist wisdom that promotes the concepts of harmony and of existing in balance with nature and our environment. They really seemed to know what mattered..

- We have met a lot of very happy, relaxed and contented people. Some could use their own practical skills to be self-sufficient and some had strong links to their local community and actively contributed to it. However, most importantly of all, these happy people tended to be close to nature, either working directly on the land or spending a great deal of time in our natural environment.

- When I step back to consider these three things, I believe I can make a conclusion:
Towns and cities are a relatively recent invention i.e. the urban based lifestyle of the Western world was triggered by the industrial revolution and is therefore only around 230 years old; a blink of an eye in human evolutionary terms. It seem to me that there is a profound gap when you compare the levels of contentment and mental health in the urban centres of the West vs. the people who live in a way that is much closer to our nature. In other words, human achieve their greatest contentment when they live how we evolved to exist, particularly in being immersed in nature. This all seems fairly obvious when you put it down in writing, but it has taken this fourteen week experience to reveal it, to understand and then to believe fully in the level of its importance.

It's safe to stay that we've all had our minds broadened by our travels. It will be fascinating to see how these learnings affect the decisions we all make in the future.

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