Cool, Calm, Collected: The Coolness of Nature & Living Less

Cultivation runs to simplicity; half-way cultivation runs to ornamentation.

Bruce Lee


The original way needs nothing to be added, nor is it clogged up. It perfectly suffices in itself. Because human beings have the ability to think, they always want to add something, and soon everything gets clogged up.

Zen Master Kosho Uchiyama

The epitome of cool alas! is not Steve McQueen’s ride in Bullit but something far simpler, far less mechanical, some-thing that is in fact no-thing. I am of course speaking about Nature.

NATURE at large, whether a river, a hill, or a wood, exudes a coolness that one can feel as one approaches. I’m talking here primarily of coolness as a temperature as opposed to coolness as an aesthetic of attitude. Although, the attiude of a forest to remain where it is against all the odds, to remain standing and not to flee in the face of its murderers, is probably the epitome of cool as that aesthetic of attitude.

This coolness (whether attitude or temperature) is the exact opposite of the city’s heat island effect (and cringeworthy self-infatuation) where the temperature of the metropolis due to all that ‘hot air’ and wasted energy (all that fashioning and manufacturing) is a few degrees greater than the surrounding countryside. It’s not that the wood feels cool in comparison to the city, but that it is cool in its own right. Approach a forest, a mountain, or a river, preferably during summer or spring, and you will feel it, this exudation of coolness which in itself is a vision of calmness, and collectedness (where all things are bound together in this wasteless, self-enclosed ecosystem). It’s attitude too - ‘better to live on your feet than die on your knees’, ‘we shall not be moved’ - is cool in its uncompromising tone.

Where humans seem to achieve coolness with self-conscious aplomb, trees achieve it without. In other words, humans try to be cool, and in so doing, negate the very essence of coolness. Trees (or equally, rivers, and hills), in their absolute nakedness make no such effort. They simply are, and as a consequence, they are cool. There’s no trying, no ornamenting, no fashioning. At least, not from without. Humans, on the other hand, appear to think that coolness only comes from without, from what you put on, from how you decorate the self from the outside. But it’s not. That, I’m afraid, is just the wool that has been pulled over your eyes (as well as over the rest of your body) by those keen to exploit you, to profit from selling you the bells and whistles. There’s simply no money to be made from decorating you from the inside out, naturally. It’s all about the glittering surfaces, the coolness of man. But this is artifice. Identity is not what you put on, but what you take off.

It is one of the great illusions of the modern world - the greatest trick the devil ever played - the standalone identity of man as a ‘unique’ individual. Even the word ‘individual’, for anyone that still has some command of language beyond the limited syntax of a metaphysically illiterate society, tells us in no uncertain terms of our essential undividedness. If there is an identity, in other words, it is not that of a disintegrated ‘unit’ as we have come to know it, but as an integrated unity that sees the self and its environment as a single evolutionary event. As the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once wrote in a poem he entitled Learning:

To believe you are magnificent.

And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent.

Enough labour for one human life.

Real coolness needs nothing to improve it. Not even magnificence. Life itself is cool. Why should you have to add to it? Unless of course you’re under the illusion that you ‘need’. But ‘need’ is another illusion, another PR ploy that has been blown out of all proprtion for the sake of a self-destructive economic system predicated upon growth and greed.

If there were ever an adjective that could smite the coolness of man in one fell swoop it is ‘needy’. ‘Be more dog’ huge billboards scream out, the mantra of the west. Presumably, that translates as be more needy, be more dependent, be more excitable, and quite frankly, be more stupid.

‘Don’t ever tell me that you need anything’ a Zen master famously tells his pupil. Essentials like food and water, sleep and shelter, even simple clothing, is not need. It is essential. It is a necessity. But anything that is not essential, which is more or less the vast part of capitalism’s undertaking, is need. And need is not cool. Need causes dependency, pathology, obsessiveness, unhealthy attachment and addiction. It causes the brain to turn to mush.

To be sure, within the concocted lexicon of the modern day state (a modern day state predicated upon selling), ‘need’ is often portrayed as ‘quirkiness’ or ‘zaniness’ or simply eccentricity. In other words, need, like greed, according to the market, is good. Need helps the economy grow. Need makes you more comfortable. Need helps others. But of ourse this is just another fatuous rationalization on behalf of the market. Need may well help the economy grow but at what cost? Alas! the planet is not an infinite resource, and even if it were…

If there is a 'need' and an essential requirement for man, it is, as Theodore Roszak eloquently points out in The Cult of Information:

... our need to become serious human beings, people who grow by virtue of having struggled in the solitude of the heart to find both moral dignity and personal meaning. It is our need to live deeply, to take life in our hands, to weigh and feel it, to give it deliberate shape - our own shape, the shape of our peculiar experience. Debased consumer fantasies, selfish acquisitiveness, the careerist rat race, the corruptions of elitism: these are surely among the forces that thwart our need to grow.

So… man is not cool, for he is in a constant state of illusory need, whilst disregarding the essential requirement he needs the most. He is demented, for he has been removed of his own mind (the decline of civilizations begins with a decline in metaphysics and the eco-philosophic spirit). He is like a caged lion that has spent too long behind bars and has taken to chasing and eating its flea-bitten tail. Man now takes his cues not from the great teacher herself, Nature, but from tabloids, chat shows and corporations.

The human has lost his cool. And become Man (emphatically capitalised).

On the metaphysical front, man’s coolness has, by the looks of it, been destroyed altogether, coolness as collectedness and the ability to see events from an unself-conscious and wide-angled perspective. The Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus was a great believer in accepting one’s fate calmly and dispassionately and viewing life from a broad perspective, living one’s philosophy without making a song and dance about it. He is known for his essentialist manifesto and his eagerness to simplify life to the limit, stripping it of superfluities and non-essential ingredients.

With a global population now in excess of 7 billion people and still climbing, and in spite of the astonishing scientific advances and economic progress of the modern world, worldwide suffering and inequality is still commonplace. Indeed, it is now estimated, at the onset of the third millennium, and in spite of the last half century’s efforts to reduce the inequality gap, that just 80 people, with their combined wealths, ‘own the world’.

Writing in his autobiography, Joy in Living, in 1957, the Scottish Thoreau and life-long advocate for the simple life, Dugald Semple, remarks: It is said that the Persian Empire decayed when 1 per cent of the people owned all the land, and that when Rome fell, 1,800 men owned all the then known world.

Civilization is on the edge of the precipice (yet again), having, apparently, learned nothing. So much for science and progress, and ‘civilization’. But then civilization is, paradoxically, midst our image-blasted and ocularcentric societies, not so much the art of looking at but the art of looking away, or, at the very best, the art of tele-vising and watching from a (safe enough) distance. The commodification and packaging of the individual (physically through fashion and narcissism, and metaphysically through scientism and desecration) has led man to think of himself as a finite, standalone entity. He has removed himself (and allowed his self to be removed) from nature, whilst embedding himself in concrete. He has degraded the soils and seas, treated the land like a rubbish tip when it isn’t a lumber yard and theme park, and sold his self out to the lowest bidder, occasionally tax deductible. He has sold his wings for wheels, and his eyes for screens. He can no longer entertain himself but rather needs to be entertained. His work furthermore has no bearing on his living and his philosophies are garnered from cereal boxes and TV chat shows. A century and a half ago the German philosopher Nietzsche created a stir with his pronouncement of the death of god. But it wasn’t really god that had died. It was the human in which god had been living. As far as that’s concerned, it might not be so far-fetched as to suggest that the human (man + humus) is already dead, and that people, zombified by the seduction and manipulation of an economic system predicated upon patheticness, are simply grotesque versions of their original selves with little or no capacity for independent thought.

The coolness of being human has long disappeared beneath the nonsense of man.

So what to do?

Semple, like most apostles of simple living, advocated a living closer to nature, getting out into the open air, daily walking and contact with the soil, healthy eating, and what he called ‘living biologically’. ‘We must live according to the eternal laws of life, and get rid of all this false science and craving for stimulation…’

‘To make a better world, we must aim at creating not so much better engineers but better men and women’.

Before architects and teachers, what we need are whole men and women, healthy and open-minded. ‘We cannot have architecture embodying wholeness until we have architects who are whole,’ writes Henryk Skolimowski in Living Philosophy.

In other words, go out into nature and learn from it: learn from its coolness, listen to its calmness; observe its less-ness: its wastelessness, its anxious-less-ness, its PR-less-ness, its deathlessness - there are vast lessons to be learned here, lessons that you will rarely encounter in a grasping, dualistic, and fragmented man-filled world.

Collect your self beyond the nervous energy of the city, and the cling-filmed package that you have been fashioned into, and enter your self…

Get beyond the con-fusion that has elided the small self with the indefinite self…

Question the ethics of the city…

Question the difference between man and hu-man…

Live less. Be cool!

‘Frugality is not a depressing abnegation and self-denial’, writes Skolimowski, but a positive manifestation of new qualities; only then will it become elegant frugality’.

‘Self-limitation’, writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘is the wisest and most fundamental step of a man who has obtained freedom. It is also the surest path towards its attainment.’

The orgy of excess has gone on long enough. Growth is not simply the accretion of matter around a nucleus, but a matter of inner maturity. Coolness eschews the superfluous and extraneous. Existential growth is metaphysical not material.

True coolness is nakedness.

'All our troubles began', writes Semple, 'when we put on clothes'.

A Presentation of Humanity on the Autumnal Kilpatrick Braes.....