Over the last month or so I have been surprised by the number of flies which have turned up in the cottage, droning around with a strange sluggishness. More than once I have found one immobilised hideously on the floor, apparently waiting to die, or I have found their desiccated shells on window sills, pathetically light and crisp between my fingertips.
I did a bit of googling and apparently they are cluster flies, harmless diptera which are known for their lazy flight paths. They hide out in the attic or somewhere warm in the house over winter, emerging once the weather warms up, when they cluster at the windows to make an exit (hence the name).
They weren’t much more than a minor nuisance and after a week or two they tailed off. Then, a terrifying June bug turned up in the hall, big enough to give my brother a fright, and interesting enough to make me reminisce about the rhino beetles in Australia whose hissing sounds and genuine similarity, in miniature, to their larger namesake, were a source of interest to me as an antipodean newcomer.
Seasons
Cluster flies made me think about seasonality. They are pre-programmed to behave in certain ways at certain times of the year. Humans, too, used to live with the seasons, taking advantage of times of abundance and preparing for the prospect of more modest food availability. For example, in northern Greenland, where the soil is unsympathetic to vegetables or gains, just as arctic foxes often bury a bird or two underground for leaner times, so too do the locals stick hundreds of little auks into a bag made of sealskin to ferment for the winter, to ensure that they have access to a year-round protein source.
These days, a change in the seasons doesn’t necessitate a change in the way we live anymore, with a few exceptions. Many of the ancient festivals celebrated by our ancestors coincided with the changing of the seasons, for example the ancient Gaelic festivals of Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lughnasa and Samhain (the origin of modern day hallowe’en). Many of these festivals have their origins in pagan myths and beliefs, but even outside of that, they nonetheless marked a change in the weather and the daylight, and hence represented a new phase of the year.
In most societies, we can obviate the need for the laborious (if ingenious) tricks of our ancestors to store food, owing to the presence of global supply chains and a supermarket down the road. Similarly, we are not beholden to the sun for our times of rising and sleeping, and our physical comfort is not contingent on the ambient temperature. It might seem that life, then, is full of more possibility, of more choice, of more variance, yet in some ways the opposite is true.
The homogeneity of our environments is ironically conducive to us doing the same thing all the time. If you are a worker, you can work every week out of every month of the year. There is no climatic or geographic barrier to your turning up in the office with the frequency that keeping a job relies upon. Even worse, you can’t say the bus was late or you have a tickle in your throat, because of the widespread acceptance of remote work (which comes with strong upsides and downsides).
So it seems that modern humans avail of neither the seasonal mobility of hunter-gatherers nor the seasonal workload variety of our agricultural forebears.
What should be done about this? Well, possibly nothing. If you are happy in your self, maybe you don’t need a change. But I think the concept of seasonality is a helpful one, even if applied in a less literal sense.
We all have ‘seasons’ or stages in our life anyway, on a more macro level, for example: childhood, adolescence, university years, adulthood, parenthood, etc. Once we reach a certain age, usually mid-to-late twenties, there is a sense of having made it, having chosen a job, a career, a partner, and succumbing to an impulse to settle down. This has advantages – emotional and financial stability, physical security, a general sense of knowing what to expect. The same concept exists in some cultures on a more micro level, for example the Jewish Sabbath, a day of rest observed on the seventh day of the week – Saturday, or even just the concept of a weekend itself.
It seems the concept of time off for regeneration is built-in, at some level, in our schedules, and employers in most countries offer at least a few weeks off per year, for vacations, or taking time ‘off’, suggesting we weren’t always meant to be ‘on’, or simply doing the same thing.
The standard vacation doesn’t allow for enough decompression for us to really get outside of ourselves – it seems just as soon as we have finally started to forget about work, we are hopping on the plane again to be ready for the office on Monday morning. I recommend taking longer breaks, or sabbaticals, which often become voyages of discovery, to truly get a sense of reset, or just simply, to do something else. An alternative is to schedule regular weeks off, just as Sean Mccabe, the founder of seanwes, gives his team every 7th week off, as discussed by Paul Millerd in his Boundless newsletter.
In some cases, people won’t have the financial means to do this. In other cases, people can’t afford not to do this. Work and stress take their own tolls, often less tangible, until the damage is done.
I don’t believe that most of us are really so single-handed that we can do only one job for life. Most of our talents lie in specific niches, but if you are a good writer, marketer, doctor, lawyer, or pretty much anything, you can apply yourself within your field and even outside of your field in so many ways. Or else you can simply…do something else, and it doesn’t have to be work-related. It takes a bit of imagination, but once you start looking, the possibilities begin to unveil themselves.
Truthfully, humans do change a little with the seasons. We go out more in the finer weather, and in the winter we are more likely to stay in, to read, to shelter, albeit in a heated environment. Recently, there have been movements encouraging cold-water exposure and sea swimming, as well as avoiding bright light in the evenings and getting light exposure early in the day. Such efforts serve to emulate what a more historic human experience was like, with greater temperature and light variance, and as such it could be argued that it simulates a more ‘natural’ environment.
This is not a protest against contemporary ways of living – just because something is modern, or somehow antithetical to the way our predecessors lived, that does not make it bad. Progress is necessary. Antibiotics are not bad, chemotherapy is not bad, artificial light is not bad, cars are not bad, laptops are not bad. All these devices, ways of living, are simply tools to be harnessed. But equally, in a world which is overly well-equipped to deal with any and all environments, I don’t see the need to bend the knee to the demands of a society which does not always serve our best interests.
I think I’ll take a season or two, when I can. I wrote last week about the pain of working on a rare sunny day. If I had my way (and I will have my way, someday), I would not work with any deal of consistency during the summer. I would be happier to sequester myself in the office during the dour winter months, when nature has fewer delights to offer us but then, like the farmers, whose practices have not changed for thousands of years, I would cut my hay in finer weather, and enjoy the fruits of my labour.