Thought for the Day

Good morning. After another tense night watching football in the pub, my friend reminded me of how different the experience is to when we were younger.

How do you mean I asked. Well, we don’t reek of smoke, he said.

And I remembered what it used to be like. How after going to a gig, or a bar, everyone stank of someone else’s smoke afterwards. And now we never do.

It was twenty years ago this year that the Health Act passed, banning smoking in enclosed spaces… and today we take it for granted.

Last month, almost under the radar, another law passed so that anyone born since January 2009 will never legally be able to buy tobacco products.

Smoking will become rarer and rarer…but so gradually that we won’t realise.

We don’t notice change as it’s happening, it’s absorbed into the new normal.

If the morning news is immediate and dramatic, history is often incremental and invisible. It happens on the quiet.

Until you stop to notice that it’s hiding in plain sight. Or you measure it against a greater span than a news cycle. A life span, for example, a centurion like David Attenborough.

Penicillin, discovered when Attenborough was two, has a reasonable claim to being the best invention since sliced bread… except that sliced bread was also invented in 1928.

My uncle Dave, who died the other day, was the last of my mothers eleven siblings. One didn’t survive into adulthood due to polio, a disease almost eradicated today.

People no longer have 12 children like my grandparents, - the NHS, born when Attenborough was 22, introduced the contraceptive pill and family sizes fell.

Then there’s electrification or the mobile phone - when Attenborough was 50 … as well as, on the down side, the atom bomb and global warming.

Just as we might wonder how our ancestors tolerated slavery or hanging maybe our descendants will wonder how we tolerated the industrial production of animals for food or tearing down rainforests.

The American essayist Rebecca Solnit, who calls herself, in a winning phrase, an ‘ambient Buddhist,’ says that it’s not heroic leaders who change history but the seeds planted quietly by communities acting together… who may not live to see those seeds flower.

Seeds of equality or justice or peace which, once planted, may seem to disappear.

In her new book, The Beginning Comes After The End, Solnit calls these seeds ‘imaginal cells’ which hold ‘the instructions for transformation’.

Or as Jesus of Nazareth told his friends, ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’

Good morning.

07 MAY 26

Early one morning last week, I was taking a walk from the church to the park in central London where I live. I walked down Waterloo Place, named after the battle more than 200 years ago when on a June Sunday, 60,000 casualties and thousands of horses were killed on a muddy field in present day Belgium. Past the memorial to the war in Crimea fought three decades later when hundreds of thousands of men died, many from infected wounds. Historic acknowledgement of terrible bloodshed collided with the present day as I noticed a new statue, as yet without too many crowds to see it, had appeared overnight. We now know it was put there by Banksy.

05 MAY 26

05 MAY 26

I don’t know about you, but May is my favourite month: spring in its pomp and the blessing of light, warm days to come!

And with ‘international dawn-chorus day’ tomorrow, too, it’s an invitation to hear nature’s songs of praise sung from the treetops afresh.

If you struggle to rise early, you could follow the advice of journalist Henry Porter and drink a lot of water before you go to bed.

Though some may not have been to bed at all! — a report out this week says that birdwatching is now the second most popular hobby among “Gen Z”. Almost three quarters of a million 16-29 year-olds bird-watch regularly, which has to be good news.

A young woman called Jess Painter, of the RSPB youth council, said that by pausing “to be curious, to watch, listen and learn, you open yourself up to endless small moments of wonder.”

With so much strife in the world, it’s surely one profound way of clearing our heads.

Yet as Jess hints, getting out to watch the birds, or to listen to the dawn chorus, is not merely escape from what’s wrong, but embrace of what’s right: nature calls to our own better nature, too — to give the gift of our attention, so desperately fought over by the tech giants, to what’s natural, beautiful.

And as a Christian I’d say to sense the Creator’s presence, too, within the awe-inspiring symphony of Creation.

Such awe is so good for us — our ego knows it can’t possibly compete with a choir of blackbirds, robins, warblers, even a nightingale if we’re very lucky — so it quietens, and lets the soul stir to become part of ‘the family of things’ again, as the poet Mary Oliver puts it.

And in such moments, shift happens.

Recently, I interviewed the eminent ecologist Tom Crowther, who says that nature is filled with feedback loops — some of which are destructive, when the balance of an ecosystem has been upset (so often by humans); while other loops are restorative, regenerative — and we can be part of them.

As a scientist, he said that it’s crucial his discipline learns spiritual practices of contemplation, meditation, prayer, as ways to help break the circuit, to step out of our personal feedback loops of despair, into ones of hopeful uplift instead.

Take joy in nature, as we rediscover our own nature singing its song, too.

Watch the birds of the air, as Jesus said for good reason.

It may start simply with setting an alarm for tomorrow — or by drinking that large glass of water tonight.

Whatever helps us best to catch this polyphonic wake up for the soul.

Good morning.

30 APRIL 26

Good morning I’m a bit biased, but the River Wear might be my favourite river in Britain. Winding through the city of Durham and connecting the Pennines to the sea, it has witnessed some of my happiest moments and easily absorbed any personal crises I might wish to throw at it. This week marks the completion of a major restoration project for the Wear; 1,700 saplings have been planted along its banks, in the hope that the new trees will safeguard both the health of the water and the creatures who live in and alongside it.