Notes on a Nervous Planet(44)
The world is like that, too. There are as many worlds as there are inhabitants. The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called ‘The World’. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.
We have to find, within all those billions of human worlds, the one we want to live on. The one that, without us imagining it, would never arrive.
And, likewise, we have to understand that however it might influence them, the world is not our feelings. We can feel calm in a hospital, or in pain on a Spanish clifftop.
We can contradict ourselves. We can contradict the world. We can sometimes even do the impossible. We can live when death seems inevitable. And we can hope after we knew hope had gone.
You, unplugged LIFE CAN SOMETIMES feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it’s hard to hear the song at all.
And like that overcrowded song we, too, can feel a bit lost.
Our natural selves haven’t changed in tens of thousands of years, and we should remember that, with every new app or smartphone or social media platform or nuclear weapon we design. We should remember the song of being human. To think of the air when we feel stuck underwater. To find some calm amid an age of saturated marketing and breaking news and the million daily jolts of the internet. To be unafraid of being afraid. To be our own brilliant, true, beautiful, fragile, flawed, imperfect, animal, ageing, wonderful selves, trapped in time and space, made free by our ability to stop, at any moment, and find something – a song, a sunbeam, a conversation, a piece of pretty graffiti – and feel the sheer improbable wonder of being alive.
18
EVERYTHING YOU ARE IS ENOUGH
‘There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.’
—Aldous Huxley
Things that have almost always been
CLIFFS. TREE FERNS. Companionship. Sky. The man in the moon. The sentimentality of sunrises and sunsets. Eternal love. Dizzy lust. Abandoned plans. Regret. Cloudless night skies. Full moons. Morning kisses. Fresh fruit. Oceans. Seas. Tides. Rivers. Lakes as still as mirrors. Faces full of friendship. Comedy. Laughter. Stories. Myths. Songs. Hunger. Pleasure. Sex. Death. Faith. Fire. The deep silent goodness of the observing self. The light made brighter by the dark around it. Eye contact. Dancing. Meaningless conversation. Meaningful silence. Sleep. Dreams. Nightmares. Monsters made of shadows. Turtles. Sawfish. The fresh green of wet grass. The bruised purple of clouds at dusk. The wet crash of waves on slow-eroding rocks. The dark slick shine of wet sand. The gasping relief of a thirst quenched. The terrible, tantalising awareness of being alive. The now that for ever is made of. The possibility of hope. The promise of home.
What I tell myself when things get too much
1.It’s okay.
2.Even if it isn’t okay, if it’s a thing you can’t control, don’t try to control it.
3.You feel misunderstood. Everyone is misunderstood. Don’t worry about other people understanding you. Aim to understand yourself. Nothing else will matter after that.
4.Accept yourself. If you can’t be happy as yourself, at least accept yourself as you are right now. You can’t change yourself if you don’t know yourself.
5.Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.
6.Find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you’ll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.
7.Don’t fix yourself down. Don’t be blinded by the connotations of your name, gender, nationality, sexuality or Facebook profile. Be more than data to be harvested. ‘When I let go of what I am,’ said the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, ‘I become what I might be.’
8.Slow down. Also Lao Tzu: ‘Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’
9.Enjoy the internet. Don’t use it when you aren’t enjoying it. (Nothing has sounded so easy and been so hard.)
10.Remember that many people feel like you. You can even go online and find them. This is one of the most therapeutic aspects of the social media age. You can find an echo of your pain. You can find someone who will understand.
11.As Yoda nearly put it, you can’t try to be. Trying is the opposite of being.
12.The things that make you unique are flaws. Imperfections. Embrace them. Don’t seek to filter out your human nature.
13.Don’t let marketing convince you that happiness is a commercial transaction. As the Cherokee-American cowboy Will Rogers once put it, ‘Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.’
14.Never miss breakfast.
15.Go to bed before midnight most days.