Awareness

In November it has been (not all on the same date):

British Sausage Week
World Diabetes Day
Alcohol Awareness Week
Movember
Transgender Awareness Week
and (I kid you not) Counter-Terrorism Awareness Week

Now there will be a myriad of reasons why these events exist - reasons of health, reasons of commerce, reasons of security, reasons of education, and so on - but one the reasons is to raise awareness.

And some are done in a lighthearted vein; British Sausage Week is a harmless(?) commercial drive to push British Produce ™ and give something for breakfast DJs to have a lighthearted segment about: Movember is a lighthearted way of raising funding for some more serious issues.
Others are born out of necessity - Alcohol Awareness Week is one way the strain on the NHS can be tackled (IE stop drinking so much - it hospitalises you) and presumably Counter-Terrorism Awareness Week is designed to remind us to help fight in the war on terror, by questioning all forms of unattended luggage. [I do jest a bit on the last one, but I suspect if I gave proper care and attention to the subject, it would end up being a valid concern].

But what these all do, on some level or other, is educate us. Or at least attempt to educate us.

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For many of us, we have a matter-of-fact approach to education -> you get it until you are 16 or 18 at school, and then you get on with living.

When of course a lot of us choose further education; in the traditional sense of university, apprenticeship, on-the-job-training, etc. but also in less obvious ways - we self-teach by reading articles/books/the internet - we learn through peer-to-peer interactions - we learn through new experiences.

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I’d like to think that most of us are still open to being educated further. Perhaps not in such clinical/classroom terms, but I guess we should be aware (aha!) that learning should be an ongoing process.

Of course people should also be aware that you can have bad teachers - your peers might turn Movember into a simple moustache-growing competition, and the awareness piece goes un-discussed. Or you might lose sight of the fact that British Sausage Week is just about selling more sausages - although for some people, that is their livelihood.

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What becomes a challenge is the saturation of awareness.

I’m pretty sure there is a National [X] Awareness Day for every single day of the year (just of varying degrees of known-ness) and that does raise the question of ‘which of these are important to me?’

I would say it is not possible to take on awareness of every cause, charity, movement, etc. there is - as valid as they all might be - but what is possibly possible, is to take a few of them and embrace them, and promote them - which I would say is what people do.

And for me this becomes a question of ‘which are the most important of these awarenesses to have?’. Both individually, and collectively as a society.

And do these two scenarios results in different lists of what to be aware of?

Maybe you can try that now. Take the 6 awareness movements I have listed at the start, and rank them from 1-6 which matters to you personally; and which matters at a societal level.

I’m pretty sure we’ll all have different answers.

But at least we can being to be a bit more aware about what we want to be aware of. And why.