Mindfulness: A Path to a Kinder You and a Better World

I’ve had a daydream since I was young: if I suddenly became fabulously rich, what would I spend my money on? And while most of us will never have the opportunity to indulge on a massive scale, there is a lot of money out there, sloshing around in the world economy. A lot of it doesn’t seem to be doing much good – but what if we could get hold of some of it?

I turned my daydream into a thought experiment in my new book, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. It imagines we have control of one per cent of world gross domestic product, which comes to about $1 trillion. By comparison, the richest 1% of people in the world own about $162 trillion in assets. I set some rules: no spending on military projects, and no spending on media or politics. You have to spend a trillion dollars on projects to improve human health and welfare, advance scientific knowledge, or protect and save the environment. I came up with ten megaprojects. From solving world poverty, to searching for alien life in solar system and beyond. I look at spending money aimed at curing all diseases and extending human lifespan, and at establishing a lasting human settlement on the Moon. There is an incredible amount of things we could do, for what in the grand scheme of things is not that much money.

The world faces many problems. The most pressing are the problems of climate change and the collapse of biodiversity. These are huge issues, and frankly some scenarios we could see in the coming years and decades are quite terrifying. But what I found in my book is that we already have the means to solve these problems. It will take political will, society will need to change, and our consumption will need to become sustainable, but the solutions are there and investment in the right areas can really do good – it could, in fact, save the world.

This decade is one of the most consequential in the history of the world. What we do now, in the next few years, will shape the planet for centuries to come. I’ve outlined the ways we can do this. From speeding the transition of our energy use away from fossil fuels, to restoring and protecting vast areas of land and sea in order to drawdown carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to tackle the extinction crisis. We don’t have the trillion dollars, but the more we understand that the world’s problems can be solved, the more optimism and momentum we can build, and the more pressure and influence we can put on the rich and powerful people in the world. 

We can do this. Indeed, we must do this. How would YOU spend the money? 

Hello. My name is Callum the Camel and I am from Morocco in the north of Africa. Full disclosure – I am not a camel because they have two humps, I am a dromedary but humans are very bad at names. They call me a camel and it’s stuck. I don’t mind too much since some of my best mates are camels, and after all what is a hump between friends?

This year has been the hardest but the best year of my life, let me tell you why.

I was just lolloping along as usual, part of the herd, nothing special. My job was to carry tourists and all their bags on camping trips into the desert for a few days. We would go out in a group of about twenty and walk for a little while then set up camp and relax before going home to our nice comfy field in the plains with plenty of delicious thorny acacias to snack on and warm sand to roll in for a good back scratch. It was, to be honest, a pretty cushy number.

But I think I went a bit over the top of on the delicious thorny acacia trees and that was my downfall. Brahim, our human, was putting together a team for an Alice Morrison Expedition. I had heard of this Explorer. She was a nutter, always running up mountains and cycling across continents and I didn’t fancy that at all. I tried to hide right at the back but he spotted me, “Callum, look how lovely and big you are. You’re exactly what we need for three long, tough months across the desert. You’ll be able to carry all the heaviest equipment, and you can live off all that fat when we run out of food.”

3 months? Run out of food? Tough? Heavy? This was not sounding good, but we camels have to earn our crust, so off I set. Alice was aiming to become the first woman ever to walk the whole length of the Draa River Valley in Morocco – 1500km (nearly 1000 miles). Every day, we’d get up before sunrise, get loaded and walk for around five to six hours till we stopped at camp for the night.  Before we started, Brahim gave us a team talk, “Now, camels, this will be difficult, you will want to give up, but we are a team and if you just keep walking, if you persevere, you’ll be the first camels ever to walk the length of the Draa. You’ll make history, imagine that.”

It was very hard. The sun was boiling hot, nearly 50 degrees, and the ground under my soft hoof pads was often sharp and rocky. One day, I stepped on a big thorn about the length of a pen and Brahim had to pull it out. I won’t repeat the very bad swear words I said. It hurt a lot.

We were walking through the desert and often it would be three days before we could drink. Now, we camels pride ourselves on not having to drink every day but that is a long time, and I was always so happy when Alice and Brahim got water from the well and poured it out for us. I liked shaking my head with all the water in my mouth and giving them a little shower to say thank you.

The worst part, though, was when we got to the wilderness. Because there had been no rain for a long, long time we had nothing to eat. My stomach rumbled and grumbled as I waited for our one meal a day of oats. Alice tried to help. She always saved her orange peel for me and gave me some of her biscuits at tea break. She ate oats too, but hers were a weird human type called porridge. Fortunately, I had my nice fat hump and I could use that to give me energy.

The months passed and I kept going. Sometimes I sang (I sound a bit like Harry Styles), sometimes I played fantasy football, sometimes I told Alice jokes although she never seemed to get them and sometimes, I looked around me at all these new places I was passing and felt amazed. Mainly though, I just persevered, kept on walking even when I was tired and hungry, and we still had a long way to go.

Then, all of a sudden, the air got cool and I saw birds for the first time in months. Ahead of me there was something big and blue with white tops that made a kind of roaring noise. Alice started whooping and running around. “Thanks be to God,” said Brahim. “We have reached the sea.” He led us into this big, moving mass of water  and I felt a new feeling. I felt proud. I had made it across 1500km and I had become the first camel ever to walk the Draa River Valley in Morocco.

“Callum, you are a hero,” said Alice, “You have done what no camel has done before and now your name will be written in the history books – Courageous Callum, Dromedary of the Draa.”

Voice of Alice Morrison   

Alice Morrison is a Scottish Adventurer based in Morocco. She is the presenter of the BBC2 Series Morocco to Timbuktu: An Arabian Adventure.  She has undertaken some tough, physical and mental challenges including: The Tour D’Afrique, cycling from Cairo to Cape Town; running round Everest;  and the Marathon des Sables, the toughest footrace on earth; She has just completed a 4000km exploration on foot of Morocco from the Mediterranean Sea to the Mauritanian with her six camels when she found dinosaur footprints and a lost city and investigated the space ships of the desert. She speaks fluent Arabic and French and 20 words of lots of different languages. “Everyone has an inner Adventurer in them, let yours out!” is her mantra.

Favourite book right now? The Home Going, by Yaa Gyasi 
  

Favourite lesson at school? English

Favourite animal/lifeform? Camels! (and cats)

Favourite hero/heroine? Freya Stark

When I was very little, much like many other children, I had a piggy bank in my room in London in the UK. I’d save up my pennies and my pound coins and think of all the wonderful books I’d be able to buy the next time we went to the shops. Sometimes if it was a really special book, and I couldn’t wait for it to be a birthday gift, it would take me quite a few months to collect enough money to cover the cost of it.

For many children all over the world, the piggy bank is their first exposure to finance and the world of money and business. It’s where, like me, you’d put your spare change and pocket money. Perhaps you do some chores and get paid for them – this little home bank is the place to store those coins.

But the Piggy Bank actually has a very long history, going all the way back to 1450. That’s the earliest date the term is recorded in the dictionaries. Back then, before there were banks, people would put their money into an earthenware pot called ‘a pygg’. Years later when potters were thinking about designs, they took that word and took the farmyard animal and ta-da, the traditional piggy bank was created. Nowadays, piggy banks can come in all shapes and sizes. They can look like any animal or shape.

When I was eight I decided I wanted to be a journalist and tell people’s stories. I secretly also wanted to be an author. But you can’t do anything really unless you come up with a way to make money to pay for things like food, bills, housing. That could mean you become an entrepreneur and have your own ideas about business, or you could work for a company and they pay you money for your services. You could invest your money in businesses you think might become successful and take the money you’ve put in and help it grow. For some people they have to rely on their government to help them survive.

But even when you have money, you have to learn how to use it well. This is known as becoming financially literate. Research suggests that two out of three people around the world are unable to understand money matters which affect their daily lives. Many governments and organisations are trying to change that.

A few years ago I found out there were lots and lots of animal words which could be used to help make the business world less scary and help people understand their money better. I teamed up with an illustrator called Dominic Bailey and we started to investigate for our book called Bear Markets and Beyond: A Bestiary of Business Terms. A bestiary is a word that emerged in Medieval times and is a type of animal reference book.

We discovered that business beasts pop up everywhere. As well as the piggy bank at home, you’ve got Bear Markets – which happens when stocks and shares fall – and Bull Markets – which happen when the price of stocks and shares are on the rise. Cash Cows are named because they are products that are always able to make money somehow. And when the coronavirus pandemic started to spread around the world, there were people who would stockpile essential items like toilet paper and pasta. It turns out there is a German word called Hamsterkauf which was ideally suited to describe what was going on. Hamsterkauf translates to ‘hamster purchase’ and is another phrase for panic buying.

There are animal terms for the way people behave too when it comes to their investments. Meerkats are constantly on the lookout and want to know just how well their money is doing, while Sheep investors find it hard to figure out just what they actually want. There are even terms relating to workers and technology. A Unicorn company, for example, is one that’s worth $1bn, while someone who was down for the Lobster Shift in a newsroom, knew they’d be up all night working.

The world’s economy is something that’s really important. It’s about how different governments, organisations, people, at all levels manage money and other financial resources they have access to. Sometimes it seems like it can be a very closed off world but any steps that can be made to make it easier to understand are being celebrated. Even animals like ours…

Bear Markets and Beyond: A Bestiary of Business Terms is published by Portico, an imprint of Pavilion Books

Voice of Dhruti Shah

Award-winning journalist, writer, producer and storyteller. Well versed in creating digital strategies from scratch, development, presenting, newsgathering, giving social media accounts a unique voice, verification and debunking fake news, training, coaching and motivating young journalists. I am innately curious and have written on subjects including technology, business, women changing the world, comics, science and much more. I have a wealth of editorial experience built up first in local papers before jumping to global newsrooms. I have led record-making BBC international partnership projects. I’m always up for an adventure. I’ve been described as an ‘ideas factory’ and have a knack for spotting unusual ideas which audiences like.