The art of being inconvenienced

In our fast-paced attention-deficient society, Elizabeth Wainwright reflects on the value of inconvenience as a safeguard against the commodification of life.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

a newly laid hedge merges into an older one, next to a road

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

It’s May as I write this, and I’m noticing Iris flowers everywhere. They don’t flower for long, but they are glorious when they do. There is another kind of Iris too - our newborn daughter Iris, born in May under a full moon; appropriately named the ‘flower moon’ in some cultures. And it really was a time of flowers - in her name, and in the Devon hedgerows outside which were bursting into life and nurturing a rainbow of wildflowers - pink campion, creamy hawthorn, yellow celandine, bluebell, violet, endless green. These hedgerows are ancient. ‘Hooper’s formula’ can give an estimate of just how ancient - counting the number of woody shrubs and trees in a 30m section and multiplying by 100 gives a rough estimate (one species for every 100 years). This makes the hedges and sunken earth-banked lanes around us well over 1000 years old, thousands of years in places. They feel essential to the structure of this place.

The layers of land in this part of Devon are overlain and interwoven, sometimes reinforcing what was there before, sometimes obliterating it. Today the threat of obliteration looms larger than ever - development, forestry and rapidly changing agricultural practices all squeeze rural communities and landscapes to the edge. But these old hedgerows and earth banks seem to resist the march of development and ‘progress’ – continuing a line of resistance that stretches back to the local Celtic people resisting Anglo-Saxons, who in turn resisted the Normans. The hedges represent old ways, they hold their ground and ask us to slow down and prioritise other things than convenience and blind progress.

Because for local farmers, it is not convenient to farm these small wonky fields with their thick-hedged edges. In other parts of the country, fields got bigger and bigger as hedges were ripped out, especially during the Second World War when food production was a priority. And the size of fields kept pace with the growing machinery used to farm them. Farmed fields in some parts of the country are now vast. But not here. Outside the window huge tractors thunder past, but they look out of place in these narrow lanes and small fields - old spaces that are less and less able to resist the damage of modern machines.

I think inconvenience is good for love and for neighbourliness. Loving and knowing our neighbours are beautiful intentions, but they can quickly become easy words and abstract concepts.

But whilst these ancient hedgerows are inconvenient for modern farming, they are convenient for life, because things can exist here that wouldn’t if the hedges were removed - biodiversity, soil structure, shelter and food for countless species through the year; species that are under threat from intensive agriculture elsewhere. It is the inconvenience of the hedges and fields here that leaves room for life.

I think about how this is true of other things; how inconvenience might bring life, how it might even be essential for our relationship with things that matter. Two specific things come to mind.

First, I think inconvenience is good for love and for neighbourliness. Loving and knowing our neighbours are beautiful intentions, but they can quickly become easy words and abstract concepts. Putting the idea of neighbourliness into practice will be inconvenient - it will have an impact on me and my life, it will take time and might be awkward at first - but it is where the love and I think the hope is. The future has lately been sounding bleak - heatwaves and wildfires and temperatures higher than climate modelling has predicted; economies in turmoil; never ending conflicts. Loving our neighbour isn’t about niceness, or just for when it’s convenient – it’s for right now as the world burns, it’s for helping us know the world through the lives of others, it’s for rebuilding affection and life on earth.

Second, I have found that inconvenience is good for knowing the Bible. When I first began reading it — curiously but non-committaly as a young adult — the thing that kept me coming back was its beauty. Much of its meaning was lost to me, but its sound and rhythm wasn’t. The Bible is inefficient, inconvenient. It is often impenetrable, mysterious, poetic. And poetry is often inconvenient - it asks us to slow down, to pay attention, to engage imagination and heart and feeling, to re-read something that might not at first be clear. And when its meaning or imagery sticks then it remains, I do not forget it. If the Bible’s authors wanted readers to understand something, to believe something, there are shorter and clearer ways to do so which might even guarantee particular outcomes like belief. But the Bible turns towards poetry and beauty and depth - not transfer of information, not efficiency, not convenience. It asks the reader to slow down and listen, to reach beyond the immediacy of information to another way of being and knowing.

Another Iris speaks - not flower, not daughter, but a singer through our kitchen speakers - Iris Dement is singing a song called Working on a World I May Never See. It makes me think about the importance of investing in hedgerows and neighbours, a declaration of belief that their possibility offers more than the efficiency and productivity they sacrifice. Because we are not made for efficiency, or blind progress, or productivity. I think we are made to love, and to work on a world we may never see; an ask that I increasingly see requires not just ‘development’ and technology and financial investment, but investment in love and neighbours and place. But as the world hurtles on, love seems diminished, its power underestimated or increasingly it seems, unknown. I notice talk of love sometimes met with cynicism, as if it’s a warm fuzzy idea but not something to take seriously, as if it might be world-shaking. But I think it is — or it could be if we let it.

And so I welcome inconvenience, I welcome the courage and patience it teaches me.

The hedgerows and my neighbours and parts of the Bible remind me to take love seriously. They slow me down with their long-way-roundedness, their use of 100 words or species where one would be more efficient, their conjuring of feeling and images where information might be quicker. They ask me to pay attention, they offer beauty, they bring my gaze to things they matter.

In Eric Fromm’s 1956 book The Art of Loving he examines various kinds of love, and then explores the disintegration of love in the modern western world, which is in part he says because:

“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.”

(All this written before the arrival of the ‘personality market’ of social media, and before Amazon’s all-consuming invitation to consume).

In examining this commodification of life, and in a line that touches on our fondness for convenience, Fromm says:

“Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.”

He goes on to argue that love is not a sentiment but a practice; one that involves discipline, concentration, and patience. These aren’t things that a fast-paced attention-deficient society leaves much room for. He says too that

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole…”

The hedgerows outside and the poetry of Bible teach me patience and concentration, and they shift my centre of relatedness outwards, from my own need for convenience, from focus on my life and just the people in it, to the wider world - worlds seen and unseen.

Fromm says

“To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.”

And so I welcome inconvenience, I welcome the courage and patience it teaches me. The life-giving ‘inconvenience’ of the ever-changing hedgerows, and neighbourliness, and the Bible, and many other things help me to slow down and pay attention, they help me to know and to love, they help me to work on a world I may never see.

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9 May 2024

5 min read

Bitterness and weaponised words can’t soften scars

Finding peace for Daniel Anjorin, Salman Rushdie and Bishop Mar Mari.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy, He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A man sits being interviewed and holds a hand to the side of his face, one lens of his glasses is tinted black.

Salman Rushdie discusses his attack.

BBC.

Knife crime around the world is unacceptably high, and with around 50,000 offences expected this year in the UK, it is sadly no surprise when we hear tragic news stories involving knives and sharp instruments. Recently, it was the terrible circumstances of the death of Daniel Anjorin that made the headlines. The gentle, much-loved, 14-year-old boy was on his way to school in East London when he, along with several others, was randomly attacked by a man with a sword. He died from his wounds shortly after being taken to hospital.

I happened to be in the middle of listening to Knife, a memoir by Salman Rushdie, when the news broke of that tragedy. It is another heart-rending story. Rushdie describes how, in 2022, during a speech he was giving about the need to protect writers, a man ran onto the stage and frantically stabbed him 15 times. Rushdie was airlifted to a hospital and survived the attack but lost an eye. Then began his difficult physical and emotional journey towards recovery, documented in the book he never wanted to write.

It was not the first time Rushdie had been the victim of aggression. In 1988, following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, the Iranian government called for Rushdie’s death by issuing a fatwa against him. His book was perceived to be blasphemous to the Islamic faith, and despite ten years of round-the-clock police protection in London, he faced several serious assassination attempts.

The fatwa was lifted in 1998, but twenty-four years later, Rushdie was clearly still not safe. He recounts the moment when he saw the man running at him in the darkness as he gave his lecture.

“My first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: So it is you. Here you are…. It struck me as anachronistic. This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now after all these years? Surely the world had moved on, and that subject was closed. Yet here, approaching fast, was a sort of time traveller, a murderous ghost from the past.”

I can’t imagine how I would cope in his shoes. I have not had to experience the daily fear of assassination for decades as Rushdie has. In all my years of delivering speeches and sermons on stages around the world, I have never had cause to even contemplate the possibility of an attempt on my life. Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear in Rushdie’s voice, the words he chose to say to his attacker:

“If I think of you at all in the future it will be with a dismissive shrug. I don't forgive you. I don't not forgive you. You are simply irrelevant to me, and from now on, for the rest of your days, you will be irrelevant to everyone else. I'm glad I have my life and not yours and my life will go on.”

Rushdie admits that his words are his weapons – and he certainly uses them to good effect. They are sharp. They are designed to eviscerate. They are calculated to cause pain. They express derision towards his attacker. Part of me cheers him on: a defenceless man in his seventies who walked into a lecture hall expecting to give a speech to rapturous applause but left barely alive as the victim of a brutal frenzied attack. Like the plot of every action movie I have ever seen, the story seems to have a happy ending – the hero is saved, the bad guy is locked up and justice is seen to be done.

But there is another part of me that knows these Hollywood endings can’t be trusted. Those 27 seconds of violence have clearly left Rushdie reduced to spitting insults at a young man in prison. He claims his life now is “filled with love”, but sadly there is little evidence of it in the way he addresses the radicalised 24-year-old. Bitterness and weaponised words, however eloquent, can’t soften the scars, nor do they make the world a safer place.

Indeed, I have found it difficult to forgive the comparatively trivial experience of being metaphorically stabbed in the back.

I can’t help but compare Rushdie’s reaction with that of Bishop Mar Mari Emanuel. The day before Knife was published, the Iraqi-born bishop was preaching at his church in Sydney, Australia, when he too was attacked by a young man with a knife, and, like Rushdie, ended up losing an eye. The attack was an overt terrorist act against Bishop Mar Mari, a controversial figure who has spoken dismissively about the Islamic, Jewish and LGBTQ+ communities.

Despite the striking similarities between the two men’s terrible ordeals, the contrast in their response couldn’t be starker. Speaking just two weeks later at a Palm Sunday service, Bishop Emanuel affirmed that he had forgiven his teenage assailant:

‘I say to you, my dear, you are my son, and you will always be my son. I will always pray for you. I’ll always wish you nothing but the best. I pray that my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ of Nazareth, to enlighten your heart and enlighten your soul your entire being to realise, my dear, there is only one God who art in heaven…. the Lord knows it is coming from the bottom of my heart. I’ll always pray for you and for whoever was in this act. In the name of my Jesus, I forgive you. I love you, and I will always pray for you.”

Woven into the fabric of every form of Christianity is a commitment to love and forgiveness, clearly exemplified for us here by Bishop Mar Mari. His words resonated around the world this week as he returned to the pulpit where he was stabbed, bandage over one of his eyes, to speak out with kindness and compassion.

I am deeply challenged by the bishop’s response. I have never experienced the physical pain and emotional trauma of a knife attack. Indeed, I have found it difficult to forgive the comparatively trivial experience of being metaphorically stabbed in the back. I know how hard it is, to be gracious to those who deliberately cause pain to me or to my family members through their actions. Like Rushdie, I sometimes I would like nothing more than to see them locked up, living a loveless, meaningless, irrelevant life. But this is not the Christian way. I follow Jesus who forgave the soldiers driving nails through his hands and feet, so I must strive to be compassionate to those who do us much lesser harm, as well as seek, in his name, to tackle the underlying causes for the greater dis-ease in society.

The issues that lead to knife crime are many and complex. They include poverty, fear of victimisation, gang culture, radicalisation, distrust of authorities, lack of education, experience of violence in childhood, and much more. Whatever we can do to tackle these problems, we do for the sake of love and peace in our world. Perhaps as we seek to overcome these things together, we can work towards a day when what happened to Daniel Anjorin on 30th April can never happen again.