Notes on a Nervous Planet(41)

The Buddhist monk Thích Nh?t H?nh writes in The Art of Power that while ‘many people think excitement is happiness’, actually ‘when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.’

Personally, I wouldn’t want a life of total neutral inner peace. I’d want to occasionally experience some wild intensity and exhilaration. That is part of me. But I crave that peace and acceptance more than ever.

To be comfortable with yourself, to know yourself, requires creating some inner space where you can find yourself, away from a world that often encourages you to lose yourself.

We need to carve out a place in time for ourselves, whether it is via books or meditation or appreciating the view out of a window. A place where we are not craving, or yearning, or working, or worrying, or over-thinking. A place where we might not even be hoping. A place where we are set to neutral. Where we can just breathe, just be, just bathe in the simple animal contentment of being, and not crave anything except what we already have: life itself.





Aim

TO FEEL EVERY moment, to ignore tomorrow, to unlearn all the worries and regrets and fear caused by the concept of time. To be able to walk around and think of nothing but the walking. To lie in bed, not asleep, and not worry about sleep. But just be there, in sweet horizontal happiness, unflustered by past and future concerns.





17

THE SONG OF YOU





Sycamore trees

DURING THE WRITING of this book, my mum had to have a major operation. She had open heart surgery to remove and replace a damaged aortic valve. The operation went well, and she recovered, but her week in intensive care was a bit of a rollercoaster, with doctors and nurses needing to keep a close eye on the levels of oxygen in her blood. They reached worrying lows.

Andrea and I went up and stayed in a hotel near the hospital. I sat by her bedside with my dad as Mum slid in and out of sleep. I helped spoon-feed her hospital meals and brought in carrier bags full of shop-bought smoothies, and the occasional newspaper for Dad. My worry about Mum stripped everything else away. I felt incredible guilt about having hardly listened when she had told me about her initial visits to the doctor.

Now, I didn’t care about any urgent emails I hadn’t got back to. I didn’t have any temptation to check social media. Even world news seemed like a background irrelevance when you were sitting in an intensive care unit hearing the wails of grief coming from beyond a thin hospital curtain as the patient in the next bed passes away.

Intensive care units are bleak places, sometimes, but those sterile rooms full of people perched between life and death can also be hopeful ones. And the nurses and doctors were an inspiration.

It’s just a shame, I suppose, that it takes such major events in our lives, or in the lives of the people we love, for perspective to arrive. Imagine if we could keep hold of that perspective. If we could always have our priorities right, even during the good and healthy times. Imagine if we could always think of our loved ones the way we think of them when they are in a critical condition. If we could always keep that love – love that is always there – so close to the surface. Imagine if we could keep the kindness and soft gratitude towards life itself.

I am trying now, when my life gets too packed with unnecessary stressful junk, to remember that room in the hospital. Where patients were thankful just to look at the view out of a window. Some sunshine and sycamore trees.

And where life, on its own, was everything.





Love

Only love will save us.





Minus psychograms (things that make you feel lighter) Imagine that, as well as psychograms, there could be things that make your mind feel lighter. We could call these minus psychograms, or -pg.


The sun appearing unexpectedly from behind a cloud





57-pg




The all-clear from a doctor





320-pg




Being on holiday somewhere with no wi-fi (after the initial panic)





638-pg




Walking the dog





125-pg




A yoga session





487-pg




Being lost in a good book





732-pg




Arriving home after a terrible train journey





398-pg




Being surrounded by nature





1,291-pg




Dancing





1,350-pg




A close relative recovering from an operation





3,982-pg




And so on.





Sri Lanka

I HAD BEEN asked to visit the beautiful fort city of Galle, on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka, to attend the literature festival there and give a talk on mental health. The event was quite special, as Sri Lanka is still a place where talking about mental illness can be taboo. And it was emotional, hearing stories of anxiety and depression and OCD and suicidal tendencies and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in a context where they aren’t normally publicly aired. It was like you could feel stigma evaporating in real time.