THE ROCKS OF CIVILISATION

...yes, the weather has temporarily beaten me and I am back to the air-conditioned comforts of home, until the cool change...

After too many social occasions for my liking and the packing of far too much stuff into the car, three hours later we arrived at our little shack on the beach . Half an hour of intensive unpacking and bed-making was followed by the sensation we go there to achieve - total peace. The future stretches away into the distance, as does the past. There is no TV, no phone, no mobile reception, just a small space and us. We have changed almost nothing since the day we bought it about 15 years ago, arriving late that first night and finding that the previous owners had not only left us everything from furniture and saucepans to toilet paper but had made the beds with new sheets, freshly ironed !Back to the present story...

Next morning, Christmas eve, I walked over to the only shop and asked the bloke if he had any phone cards as I had promised to ring my mother on Christmas day from the public phone box. He said no (what's new? He has never, ever said yes yet!) but there was another customer in the shop and he said he was going in to Maitland (about 20km away) that afternoon and would I like him to get me one from the post office? So I gave him $20 and he said he would leave the card with the shop owner later, which he did. I had never met this man before and didn't know his name but things are different away from the city and that sort of offer soothes the cynical soul no end.

Now, the reason I called this post "Rocks of civilisation" is because of Bob's lovely and thought-provoking post about filling the jar of life with rocks, pebbles and sand. If we look at this idea from a community perspective we could, and should, have a set of rocks that help us to live in a civilised way with one another. One of the rocks would be trust, like in my experience of the phone-card-man. Trust has slipped down the list of characteristics that indicate success these days and it should be up there with other big rocks like sharing and caring. Things like monetary success should be in the pebble or sand category, along with ...what? Help me out here and share with me some ideas for a jar of rocks for a civilised world...