Generous : Will My Son Become The Local Blacksmith?

Will My Son Become The Local Blacksmith?

Oliver Twist’s ‘can I have some more’ question is every child’s question, but I still look at my children and fear them asking it. Because, although they don’t know it yet, this planet and our way of doing things simply cannot sustain each successive generation having more any more.

But children in our society are hardly going to ask for less – when the ‘more’ message screams at them at every turn. So how can I school my kids that less must be the way of things? That less may actually be their ‘more’? When, for them, gap years spent travelling round the world, for instance, will carry a carbon stigma my generation had no thought of.

I was at a kids party the other day talking to another dad who was a chemist working on the development of brand new materials. He had an unshakable belief that science – developmental work like his – would enable us to overcome any hurdle the future put up. Sooner or later things would be invented and brought to market that would carry us through.

Now I’m no scientist, but I found myself playfully disagreeing with him and asking him to look over at our kids playing together. I asked him to imagine what they’d be when they grew up. I pictured a world where my oldest son would be the community blacksmith, my next oldest a miller, and then my little twin boys a cobbler and tailor. He looked at me like I was mad.

OK, so I was exaggerating. And no way am I advocating a return to feudal England. But there is a sense in which I am convinced that a Generous life, if ‘caught’ by my children (as I hope it will be) will lead to a more locally rooted life, where people will have a place and status in their communities connected to who they are and what they do within that group – something that has slowly been eroded over time and is all-but lost altogether now.

But maybe less things, less choice, less opportunity (as we understand it today) might actually mean more wealth – in terms of well-being. A shrinking world of possibility on a macro scale may lead to a more expansive sense of who we are cosmically, not just locally. That’s my hope for my children, anyway! Not that I’m any closer to answering my boys’ ‘can I have some more?’ question – other than trying to model the lesson of less in my own life, that is. I can hardly expect them to do what I don’t, won’t or can’t. Maybe I need to stop feeling bad for the things I’ve enjoyed that they may never and instead start imagining a way of life they might grow into which I wish I’d known…