Why do I go quiet on walks and often find I am unable or unwilling to enter into conversation? Why am I drawn constantly to moving out into the land, often distracted and unable to join others? I witnessed this in myself when I was in Suffolk, then in Winchester, and now of course here in Cumbria.
I think I can begin to answer this. I think it's time I tried, for myself and those closest to me at least.
Virginia Woolf and Henry David Thoreau were giants of solitude. They both found in it a way to move, even briefly, beyond themselves; toward what Buddhism calls 'unbeing'. Woolf could find it in even a simple stroll along a street provided she was alone; it gave her the opportunity to be removed for a while from her own psychological onrush, though in the end it was still the countryside that drew her to her final act of sacrifice. Thoreau sought for his 'unbeing' by living in the wilderness: watching, learning, noting, finding patterns and becoming part of the unfettered landscape of Massachusetts; for him it was as much a political necessity as a spiritual one. But they were both seeking anonymity from others and, more importantly, themselves; dissolution - temporary loss of self.
I believe this is what I've been experiencing recently; and that's not to set myself up alongside those two literary greats, by any means. I like to think of this drive, this need for dissolution in myself as both a form of meditation and an anti-social way of being (if our society's current trends are anything to go by I'm happy to be called the latter, it's a revolutionary stance as far as I'm concerned). It is an important and arresting place to be; frightening as well, from time to time.
It is not something that many people might ideally look for - loss of the self, dissolving one's sense of 'me'. Perhaps the closest anyone comes to that feeling today is whilst travelling abroad, in a foreign country - or the most remote parts of Britain. But even then it is difficult to achieve anything as thorough in our cluttered century as the two exponents from another age I cite above. After all travelling is pre-packed and often merely home from home these days; and how many really remote parts of Britain are left? In any case, who but the daring few are prepared to take the time and trouble to enter into them and receive their quiet riches?
But there are glimpses of hope and they are, I believe, necessary to my survival - if not anyone else's. What is excellent about this preoccupation with loss is that I have to be active in achieving it; willing to listen much closer to the primal self than we are used to doing, hiding out as we do amid the constant techno-chatter of our modern age and all the by-products it creates on our busy nervous systems. And all too often we are silently acknowledging our fear of being alone and running away from it when it is in fact the one place that we should go to ease fear and find strength. Two words: time and patience. We have forgotten their meaning. The first we perpetually act like we want to conquer and subsume, to bend to our will. The second we (in the western world at least) know very little of and appear to have on the whole forgotten as we replace it with products and inventions that claim to make life easier but in turn destroy our patience (and alongside it, our imaginations). As a child I was often taught the benefits of patience: 'Patience is a virtue' the old adage said, yet we bring children up in a world that has less and less of the stuff and which we are no longer practiced in enough to pass on. These two states (time and patience) which we often deny in our sagacity are mutually beneficial to both each other and to us; symbiotic. We ignore them at our loss. We lose them through ignorance.
None of this is less than obvious. But the warnings are not heeded. We are not immortal, yet we act so, consuming time like fast food, without thought to its precious possibilities; heading for a permanent physical dissolution in our belief we are greater than nature, a more potent and unworthy loss than any metaphysical one I propose is of benefit. You see, if I do not take time to know myself as an individual, in relationship to my environment and the natural world, to understand my spirit as removed from another then I remain ignorant and I pass that ignorance on and vice versa. This is a destructive loop and it is now how we as a society choose to live. Worst of all it is promoted through passivity - via entertainment which exploits our very desire not to face our fears and our responsibilities, not to listen to the solo internal voice, to check in with ourselves. Indeed it often promotes living our lives through other people's lives - witness Big Brother and the countless reality TV shows. They are excuses for people not to take responsibility for their own well-being and thereby the well-being of their environment and their world.
If I believe I know it 'all' already, that I can just sit back and relax, what is the point of my existence? I might as well kill myself and have done with it. At least that way I would enter into the huge mystery of death, that awesome 'unbeing' of which I can know nothing about in life (perhaps this is the conclusion Virginia Woolf came to beside that river, with the rocks in her pockets?). Yet if I live as though I know nothing and the world is here to teach me and I am willing to be shown, then I live always on the cusp of potential. Nothing is ever an anti-climax; it might be difficult at times trying to find a way through, but in the end hope will offer me the chance to learn. My entertainment is my own to find. This is the state I have found myself entering into when I decide to walk the 'wilderness' - life becomes rich with awe and wonder, something is always just around the corner and it is often not what I expect. For example, have you ever seen three herons grouped together basking for fish in the shallows of a lake at dusk? I have never seen more than a solitary heron at any one time, usually trying to hide form the world and secrete itself somewhere, let alone three in mutual territory and companionship.
Solitude allows me to think, to be awake. The rest of the time I find I blunder and am often misdirected by myself and others.
Do not live to please your sponsors. Be revolutionary - seek joy in the simple act of learning or the unexpected. The natural world is never less than passionate or inspiring. It denies routine. It offers a different understanding of time. The contribution a simple walk can make to one's appreciation of this cannot be underestimated - the quietening of the super-ego for a while. We are small in comparison to our potential and our world; only very few seem to be keen to strive to gain that potential or even come close to it. The natural world is our biggest clue to helping ourselves.
Everybody needs to wander somehow, sometime, and to get lost - by oneself. To be scared in either a real or metaphorical wilderness. This is not rocket science, or even a radical new idea. But I think it is surprising how little courage we have to make the simple (literal) steps necessary.
Cumbria 7/7/06
Some 'sources':
Where I Lived, And What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau (Penguin)
A Field Guide To Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit (Cannongate)
I think I can begin to answer this. I think it's time I tried, for myself and those closest to me at least.
Virginia Woolf and Henry David Thoreau were giants of solitude. They both found in it a way to move, even briefly, beyond themselves; toward what Buddhism calls 'unbeing'. Woolf could find it in even a simple stroll along a street provided she was alone; it gave her the opportunity to be removed for a while from her own psychological onrush, though in the end it was still the countryside that drew her to her final act of sacrifice. Thoreau sought for his 'unbeing' by living in the wilderness: watching, learning, noting, finding patterns and becoming part of the unfettered landscape of Massachusetts; for him it was as much a political necessity as a spiritual one. But they were both seeking anonymity from others and, more importantly, themselves; dissolution - temporary loss of self.
I believe this is what I've been experiencing recently; and that's not to set myself up alongside those two literary greats, by any means. I like to think of this drive, this need for dissolution in myself as both a form of meditation and an anti-social way of being (if our society's current trends are anything to go by I'm happy to be called the latter, it's a revolutionary stance as far as I'm concerned). It is an important and arresting place to be; frightening as well, from time to time.
It is not something that many people might ideally look for - loss of the self, dissolving one's sense of 'me'. Perhaps the closest anyone comes to that feeling today is whilst travelling abroad, in a foreign country - or the most remote parts of Britain. But even then it is difficult to achieve anything as thorough in our cluttered century as the two exponents from another age I cite above. After all travelling is pre-packed and often merely home from home these days; and how many really remote parts of Britain are left? In any case, who but the daring few are prepared to take the time and trouble to enter into them and receive their quiet riches?
But there are glimpses of hope and they are, I believe, necessary to my survival - if not anyone else's. What is excellent about this preoccupation with loss is that I have to be active in achieving it; willing to listen much closer to the primal self than we are used to doing, hiding out as we do amid the constant techno-chatter of our modern age and all the by-products it creates on our busy nervous systems. And all too often we are silently acknowledging our fear of being alone and running away from it when it is in fact the one place that we should go to ease fear and find strength. Two words: time and patience. We have forgotten their meaning. The first we perpetually act like we want to conquer and subsume, to bend to our will. The second we (in the western world at least) know very little of and appear to have on the whole forgotten as we replace it with products and inventions that claim to make life easier but in turn destroy our patience (and alongside it, our imaginations). As a child I was often taught the benefits of patience: 'Patience is a virtue' the old adage said, yet we bring children up in a world that has less and less of the stuff and which we are no longer practiced in enough to pass on. These two states (time and patience) which we often deny in our sagacity are mutually beneficial to both each other and to us; symbiotic. We ignore them at our loss. We lose them through ignorance.
None of this is less than obvious. But the warnings are not heeded. We are not immortal, yet we act so, consuming time like fast food, without thought to its precious possibilities; heading for a permanent physical dissolution in our belief we are greater than nature, a more potent and unworthy loss than any metaphysical one I propose is of benefit. You see, if I do not take time to know myself as an individual, in relationship to my environment and the natural world, to understand my spirit as removed from another then I remain ignorant and I pass that ignorance on and vice versa. This is a destructive loop and it is now how we as a society choose to live. Worst of all it is promoted through passivity - via entertainment which exploits our very desire not to face our fears and our responsibilities, not to listen to the solo internal voice, to check in with ourselves. Indeed it often promotes living our lives through other people's lives - witness Big Brother and the countless reality TV shows. They are excuses for people not to take responsibility for their own well-being and thereby the well-being of their environment and their world.
If I believe I know it 'all' already, that I can just sit back and relax, what is the point of my existence? I might as well kill myself and have done with it. At least that way I would enter into the huge mystery of death, that awesome 'unbeing' of which I can know nothing about in life (perhaps this is the conclusion Virginia Woolf came to beside that river, with the rocks in her pockets?). Yet if I live as though I know nothing and the world is here to teach me and I am willing to be shown, then I live always on the cusp of potential. Nothing is ever an anti-climax; it might be difficult at times trying to find a way through, but in the end hope will offer me the chance to learn. My entertainment is my own to find. This is the state I have found myself entering into when I decide to walk the 'wilderness' - life becomes rich with awe and wonder, something is always just around the corner and it is often not what I expect. For example, have you ever seen three herons grouped together basking for fish in the shallows of a lake at dusk? I have never seen more than a solitary heron at any one time, usually trying to hide form the world and secrete itself somewhere, let alone three in mutual territory and companionship.
Solitude allows me to think, to be awake. The rest of the time I find I blunder and am often misdirected by myself and others.
Do not live to please your sponsors. Be revolutionary - seek joy in the simple act of learning or the unexpected. The natural world is never less than passionate or inspiring. It denies routine. It offers a different understanding of time. The contribution a simple walk can make to one's appreciation of this cannot be underestimated - the quietening of the super-ego for a while. We are small in comparison to our potential and our world; only very few seem to be keen to strive to gain that potential or even come close to it. The natural world is our biggest clue to helping ourselves.
Everybody needs to wander somehow, sometime, and to get lost - by oneself. To be scared in either a real or metaphorical wilderness. This is not rocket science, or even a radical new idea. But I think it is surprising how little courage we have to make the simple (literal) steps necessary.
Cumbria 7/7/06
Some 'sources':
Where I Lived, And What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau (Penguin)
A Field Guide To Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit (Cannongate)
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