Today's Sunday New York Times Magazine includes an article by Mireille Silcoff about the rise in the UK of "fond nostalgia for the wartime deprivations of yore." From TV shows about rationing to cookbooks about how to handle the vegetables grown in your own muddy garden, Rilcoff describes how activism and hipness in Britain have embraced the dreary. She says, "The slogan for this movement is 'Keep Calm and Carry On,' lifted from the wartime Ministry of Information poster that's now standard décor in a certain kind of British starter loft." I'm not sure I need to grow rutabagas in a victory garden, but it occurs to me that this isn't a bad slogan.
Perhaps the appeal of austerity is that it affords us a measure of control in a world that can be "dreary" at best, scary at worst. Earthquakes and tsunamis remind us safety can be an allusion; uprisings tell us that humans will fight and clash. A return to simplicity folds us into this volatility and lets us create some order and even feel a bit virtuous in the process.
As for Carrying On, well, it's what we do. My friend said that her 7-year-old frequently presents disaster scenarios to her: "Mom, what if the house burns down?" We talked about it, and, really, the only answer is that we'll deal with it then. Obstacles present themselves every day. The small ones are the delayed flights, the traffic jams, the damage done at the dry cleaners. The big ones are the car accidents, the diagnoses, the divorces. And the huge ones are the unthinkables, the unnameables - death and destruction and tragedy. What to do but Carry On? Even better if we can Stay Calm.
I don't know if a "dreary salad" with "salad cream" will aid with the keeping calm part, but maybe simplicity is a ballast when life gets unstable. Whether our worries are what-if scenarios or real crises, we can choose to drop unnecessary complications and stick to the basics even if that just means saying a prayer. Pass the humble pie.
And you? How do you Keep Calm and Carry On?
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