Opinion: Connecting with my ‘caveman’ sparks a revelation
© Adobe Stock I had a profound experience recently. I discovered a deeply buried part of my character: my inner caveman.
With all the gizmos of modern life – central heating, GPS-guided drones, the Harpic Toilet Duck and so on – it’s easy to forget that, fundamentally, we humans are just wild animals in a jungle.
Sure, we can do extra things such as driving a car or wearing a hat, but ultimately we still have the same primal needs and instincts as Neolithic man.
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About the author
A lot of the current “mental health epidemic” can be attributed to our neglect of these things.
We still have a nervous system operating as though we are in the wilderness and weighing up whether to eat the thing in front of us or to shin up a tree for safety.
School visit
I had this breakthrough in the middle of a school visit to our farm. Over three days and in partnership with the Country Trust, we hosted more than 70 children with ages ranging between five and 11.
Hosting schoolchildren on your farm is not a job for the faint-hearted. Nor is it for people who don’t believe in health and safety policies.
The other bit of modern education that I hadn’t comprehended is the range in capabilities one sees now between children.
A school class is not a homogenised lump of learning sponge. It is a random collection of individuals with very different behaviours.
The current cohort spent their formative years under lockdown, and a whole generation’s behaviour was profoundly changed by this developmental break.
This is why I believe that getting urban children onto farms is more powerful than ever.
Not just to educate them about farming, but to connect them to nature and to provide them with experiences that connect them to society.
I feel sympathy for how overstimulated these children are by the modern world.
Their anxieties have been turned into defence mechanisms – wearing hoods up to appear invisible or talking too much to expel the overload of information they are subjected to.
Once I recognised this behaviour, it was possible to calm them enough to get those hoods down or to silence the chatter.
Exercises such as breathing in the smell from a field of flowers or closing our eyes and listening to skylarks, brought a sudden and genuine change in behaviour.
The moments where the children sat quietly and were engaged and curious were as fulfilling as anything I’ve ever experienced.
Duty to educate
Luckily, these moments were interspersed with enough noise and unruly behaviour to disabuse me of the notion of giving up being a businessman to become a teaching assistant.
My observation for you, as a caveman, is that we all have a duty to educate our tribe.
We can be powerful role models to these children by showing them that working is good for the soul; it brings meaning and human connection into our lives.
We can demonstrate that escaping noise and manufactured environments in favour of the natural world is calming and that eating wholesome food helps your body and brain to function.
I would urge other farmers to join with brilliant organisations such as the Country Trust and Leaf to bring these experiences to as many children as possible.