I was in my pool changing room, a good while ago now, when a woman began to bemoan the state of the world. “Don’t you think it’s all gone wrong?”, she inquired and went on to decry one thing after another.
I challenged as best I could but it was clear from the outset that her opinions would hold firm. There were three of us involved in the conversation, all in various stages of undress, which brought an oddly raw dimension to the encounter.
“The world is upside down,” the woman ultimately declared, shaking her head. “Upside down.”
The phrase stayed with me for the rest of the day.
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Because there is, as any child in my school would tell you, no upside down when it comes to the world. Or indeed, downside up. The world, as in the planet, is just there, suspended in space. A tiny speck in an infinite universe.
My mother was from Dundalk and would talk of going “down the North” without a hint of irony. And, of course, accurately so, come to think of it. As accurate as “up”, at any rate. And I’m a big fan of those maps that have inverted the hemispheres. They’re the ones that place Australia, New Zealand, South America and the like firmly on top, with Europe, North America and most of Asia tucked away underneath. Representations such as this can shift the very earth beneath your feet, making you reassess reality and your place in it.
Plants can do that too. They can help you chill out, for a start, enhancing wellbeing and diluting stress. They have a wonderful ability to calm a room or stairway or any kind of indoor location, somehow making it more welcoming and less clinical. They do the job of reminding us that the natural world exists, tapping into some deep primeval memory that we used to be part of that very world before we discovered concrete, cars and the joys of indoor living.
And plants have their own way of engaging with the world, growing and spreading and flowering at a pace and speed beyond our comprehension. We notice the changes. We perceive that they have become taller, developed blooms, extended this way or that but without in any way grasping how this was achieved. Certainly not witnessing these adjustments in real time. Without those slow-motion cameras we wouldn’t really get it at all. It’s clear that the plants exist in a parallel universe with its own rules when it comes to speed and pace. And, who knows, maybe they look at us as some kind of crazed, blurry beings with a lamentable understanding of the need for regular watering.
And what is speed anyway?
Not so long ago I watched as a snail set out on a journey to the top of the sliding door out to the garden. At least, that seemed to be its destination. And I was all set to grab a piece of card or paper and flick it back to terra firma so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the slimy residue it would leave on the glass but instead I became entirely enraptured by the slow, steady progress it made as it squelched its way up this 90-degree edifice.
It got to the top in no time at all and then, realising it could go no further, turned and began its vertical descent, once again without twisting and tumbling to its death. A snail and its means of negotiating the world is our go-to for all things sluggish, ethargic, undirected and insignificant. But I’m here to tell you that that snail had a plan and made it happen and pretty promptly at that. It took on a Himalayan challenge that would have left us homo sapiens quaking in our boots or, at the very least, making a similar ascent in hours if not days.
So maybe we should be just a tad less snail-ist when it comes to assessing achievement.
That woman in the changing room was speaking metaphorically. I get that. But she did have a point. After all, it is possible to be upside down and downside up at the same time and our sense of reality is just an agreed arrangement we came to millennia ago to make life that little bit less complicated.
And as for the plants and the snails? Who knows? They probably just get on with it. Then again, maybe they figured out the lawlessness of the world a long time ago and are waiting for us to catch up.
