Remember You're a Womble (Part One)

Yesterday while doing some internetting I came across the delightful Vegan Womble website, blog and associated Facebook group.  I signed up immediately, explored a bit and let my mind wander, something it's usually doing anyway, with or without my permission.

Underground, overground, wombling free...

There's much to be said for the benefits of letting your mind womble, I mean wander.  Daydreaming and 'unfocussed' thought is essential for creativity, neural development, mental health and therefore peace of mind: and therefore, that supposedly elusive state of being: happiness.

The Wombles were most certainly a happy bunch.  To understand why, you don't have to look any further than the lyrics of their theme song, which celebrates frugality and recycling - "making good use of the things that we find // things that the everyday folks leave behind" - along with community, simplicity and even, dare I say it, minimalism - "Wombles are organised, work as a team // Wombles are tidy and wombles are clean".  All things whose depth, beauty and importance more and more of us are starting to explore.

If you didn't have the privilege of growing up with such 1980s British children's television gems as The Wombles (not to mention Button Moon, the Raggy Dolls or any the works of the late, great Oliver Postgate) then I suggest you get yourself over the YouTube and treat yourself to a couple of episodes immediately.  You can learn as much from The Wombles as you can from a whole year of higher education.  I mean that quite sincerely.  I think.  Quite sincerely. 

From the first episode, Orinoco and the Big Black Umbrella, the virtues of idleness, curiosity and living for the moment are held in the highest esteem.  Initially late for work (which of course isn't really "work" at all) having apparently slept in, Orinoco wombles off in the hope of catching another sneaky nap on a bench.  Charged with Uncle Bulgaria (wise old sage of the Wombles) with recovering a copy of The Times, each Womble goes their separate way - alone, but with a common purpose. It's a windy day, and a discarded newspaper floating on the breeze distracts Orinoco right in the face.  Laughing it off, he folds it up and puts it in his bag.  You can probably see where this is going, but it doesn't matter.  Just enjoy it.

Trying again to climb onto the bench for his nap, our hapless hero finds himself caught up in a stray umbrella, which carries him comically away and slap bang into the trunk of a tree.  "Stop, I feel seasick!" moans Orinoco, but the feeling soon passes, as the wind mysteriously seems to do as its told at exactly the right moment.  Orinoco laughs off his misfortune a second time, and concludes, viz. aforementioned umbrella: "If only I could get this thing open, I could make it into a house and have a nap in it".  With only a paper bag, a newspaper and a umbrella to his name, Orinoco is quite content to start a new life, then and there.  No thought of what he might have left behind.  No thought of the work he "should" be doing.  Wise Orinoco, very wise.  A furry Diogenes, you could even say.

But then, in a final and brilliant ironic twist (all this, and more, in an episode of a children's television programme not even five minutes in length) the wind carries Orinoco and all his worldly goods away...away - and back, courtesy of his impromptu paper-bag parachute, to the feet of Uncle Bulgaria.  The folded newspaper falls out of Orinoco's bag right under Bulgaria's nose, and is revealed to be nothing other than exactly what Bulgaria wanted: today's Times.  Uncle Bulgaria's response?  

"You must have run as fast as the wind!  It'll be meal time in ten minutes, Orinoco.  You may have a double helping, for working so fast".

Moral of the story: idleness pays.  More or less everything you need to know about finding happiness in life can be found in these four-and-a-half minutes of children's television.

Want to take things a little deeper?  You don't really have to, but if you like, listen to the equally-great-as-Postgate, and also late, Terence McKenna:

I hadn't even intended for this post to go there, but it did.  Which seems appropriate.  I've so much more I want to say, but I think it's time for a nap.  We'll catch up later.

UPDATE: Part Two is here.

Related posts

Imagining No Possessions Part One and Part Two
Why don't we live in Utopia (and other stupid questions)
The First World Problem
Mistakes on a Plane

******
Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.