Columnists
Back to the future
Lucy Winkett
As I sit writing at my computer, the study is full of noise from the recycling truck outside the window. The engine is loud but over its growling noise comes the penetrating beeping of its alarm to tell me and anyone else in its path that it is reversing. This, as much as I'm annoyed by it at this moment, is of course very sensible. The driver is guiding the huge lorry seeing only mirrors plagued with blind spots, and so it is a sound of warning, letting us know that the potentially lethal vehicle might be headed in our direction.
It occurs to me that having an alarm sound when one is reversing is a principle that is more widely applicable. It was our former Prime Minister Tony Blair who famously asserted during negotiations concerning the Northern Ireland peace process that, if they weren't being driven forward, negotiations weren't just stationary, they were in reverse.
For such a delicate and dangerous set of conversations and decisions, that may well be true. But the relentless drive for 'progress' and 'modernisation' has been a long held principle in a broader context - that of western civilisation - since at least the 17th century. We have not been content with where we are since the early scientists and engineers began to mechanise the repetitive tasks that saved human energy and started to use up the resources of the earth.
We have some sense that we are indeed 'moving forwards' through time and attempting as we go to improve the circumstances, processes and structures of public life. That's surely what politics is all about - the management of the direction and pace of progress.
As much as I'm inspired by the rhetoric of someone like Barak Obama, for whom change and progress is a mantra, if it is unrelenting, I start to feel exhausted. I prefer what I believe to be a Jewish concept of time, one that has us in the position of a rowing boat on the sea. We sit, with our back to the unknown future, pulling on oars that cause us to notice time flowing past us. It is the past we can see in front of us, and we see more of it, the further we travel backwards.
No analogy is perfect, of course, but this one I have liked for a long time. We are all reversing, but into the future. This makes us more careful, and encourages us to establish a rhythm in our lives; then, our vision of what lies ahead will be glimpsed over our shoulders, occasionally, rather than laid out before us in a clear-sighted plan.
Another strand of Jewish thinking has us imagine that nothing makes God laugh so much as our own plans. This won't stop us planning for the future, of course, and neither should it. But we make our plans, knowing that, in the end, the future is not knowable until it happens.
We reverse, with the sound of warning in our ears, knowing with Teresa of Avila that as we lean backwards into the wind, we can never fall out of the arms of God, only into them.
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