Why climate change is like a headache in the pelvis.

"The main curriculum of your life. No sooner had I read that phrase than I kept repeating it, mulling it over. I saw at once that, far more than the time itself, the hour count, what was at stake here was a major principle. Instead of taking my work with me to hospital waiting rooms, dealing with my troubles as if I was getting the car fixed, my eye on my watch and my hand on my wallet, I would have to accept a radical shift of priorities. The pain must be allowed to come on board and take equal status beside my writing, beside my family, as part of the core curriculum." - Tim Parks, Teach us to Sit Still, p160

Climate change is about much more than words, but words matter. In this respect, leaving aside the important victory to keep climate change on the national curriculum, there is a much deeper sense in which climate change needs to become part of 'the main curriculum' of everybody's lives.

This declaration is ultimately just a form of words, but these particular words may help to reframe the necessary gestalt shift, so that we start to go way beyond 'raising awareness' or 'engagement' on the issue, which hasn't really helped sufficiently to shift inertia. Here is where this idea of 'main curriculum' comes from, and why it might matter:

 "'We strongly advise sufferers,' wise went on, 'to accept these pains as part of the main curriculum of their lives.' The main curriculum!" 

Almost three years ago I read Tim Parks's wonderful non-fiction book: Teach us to Sit Still, in preparation for him speaking at an RSA event on mindfulness. The book is a darkly humorous and profound examination of a particularly embarrassing medical condition, and an improbable journey back to health, eventually through meditation. The turning point in his recovery is when he stops trying to wish the problem away as an extraneous irritant ('an inconvenient truth') and really faces up to it as an enduring challenge that needed his steadfast time and attention. What was striking for me is that a particular form of words helped to make this shift.

In the following section Parks is at one of the many clinics he attended, looking for something to take the persistent pain away, and he recounts listening to a Dr Wise, author of A Headache in the Pelvis as follows:

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Tim Parks, Teach us to Sit Still, p 159:

"'Many of our patients are simply too busy to dedicate themselves to our treatment', Wise and Anderson observed. 'These people, men and women, were not yet suffering enough. They still saw their pains as an irritating waste of time, a distraction to put behind them as quickly as possible. Hence they were drawn to accounts of their illness that saw a rapid solutions in drugs, or in surgical operation. No personal energies need be expended. It could be paid for. Hopefully by the State.'

This described my thinking, at least until very recently, with ominous accuracy.

"We strongly advise sufferers," wise went on, "to accept these pains as part of the main curriculum of their lives."

The main curriculum!

Would I have to stop referring to my pains as stupid?

Wise's position, a little pious-sounding to my ear, was that this chronic and worsening condition was trying to tell me something about myself, about the way I had been living, and I was supposed to listen. I would have to give my pains the time of day."

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This perspective is powerful because one of the main aspects of the climate change challenge is how to bring more attention to the urgency of the issue, and what prevents that is precisely the kind of "hoping it will go away" attitude that many take to irritating health issues that are not yet causing enough suffering to be heeded.

The climate challenge calls for unprecedented political, social, economic and technological innovation and we probably need to consume less, but the speed and effectiveness of such solutions ultimately depend upon what the population thinks and cares about on a regular basis. That point is not self-evidently true, but one tangible way to think about it is that investment decisions and political will on climate change are currently shaped by vested interests that civil society needs to be mobilised to challenge.

A big part of this challenge is to find ways to make climate change 'run through' people's lives. (The literal meaning of curriculum is to run the course, as in curriculum vitae- the course of my life). We need to link concerns about climate change more closely to the experiences and values that 'run through' people's lives, including their work, their families, their health and their homes. How do we do that? It's not easy, but The Social Brain Centre has precise figures on the nature of the challenge and plans to pilot solutions that we'll share in a forthcoming report).

Given the scale and urgency of the climate change challenge we need new forms of language as much as we need new technologies and new policies. With this in mind, I humbly submit that we need to start thinking of how we can make climate change part of 'the main curriculum' of our lives.

Dr Jonathan Rowson can be followed on Twitter at @jonathan_rowson