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“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Joni Mitchell
I stood in the cold shower this morning and felt nothing. When I started, it hit like a slap and woke my whole body. Today it’s just cold water and a clock.
When my meditation practice was new, I noticed my anxiety drop and my decisions get better for the rest of the day. Now it’s normal. Once something is normal you stop noticing it.
Through the 1960s Egypt built the Aswan High Dam to stop the Nile’s yearly flood, generate power and store water for the dry season.
For thousands of years before that, the river rose each summer and spread black silt across the fields. The silt fed next year’s crops. Egypt worshipped the rising water as the god Hapi and timed festivals to it.
As the reservoir filled, it trapped the silt. The sardine catch off the delta fell from about 15,000 tons in 1964 to about 550 tons two years later.
The coastline started eroding into the sea.
I kept wanting to cut my meditation, because I stopped feeling it work.
Britain wanted to grow more of its own food. A hedgerow is a living fence: a dense line of hawthorn and blackthorn that marks a field’s edge and pens in livestock. After the war, the Agriculture Act of 1947 paid farmers to tear them out by the meter. Bigger machines needed bigger fields, so the small plots got merged.
Britain lost more than half its hedgerows, close to a million kilometers of them since the 1950s. The topsoil blew away with no windbreaks. Birds and pollinators lost their cover.
Now Britain pays farmers to plant hedges back, some working from old maps to set them where their grandfathers pulled them out.
I came close to dropping the fasting too, because I stopped noticing what it did.
For centuries, an Indian stepwell called a baoli dropped stone steps deep into the ground and gave a whole town water through the dry months. People met on the steps to draw it and talk. The deep stone stayed cool in the heat.
Then piped water arrived. A tap at home replaced the climb down for water. The wells looked unclean and outdated, so towns walked away, tipped garbage in, let the upkeep lapse. Now India talks about the day the taps run dry.
The revival has started: wells cleared out and put back to work, soaking rain into the ground. The pipes moved water to houses. The wells put water back under them, a job that stayed invisible until the pipes ran dry.
All three gave up something that still worked:
- Something new arrives and looks better than the old thing.
- The old thing keeps working, so you stop watching it.
- You cut the old thing and only then find out what it was doing for you.
The flood fed Egypt for thousands of years. The hedgerows stood for centuries. The wells outlived the empires that dug them.
Now I write down what each new habit does for me while I can still feel it. I reread that note before I cut anything.
The things that have worked the longest are the easiest to cut, because you stop feeling what they do for you.
🫥
What’s one thing you cut that you should bring back?
