139. ...knock down doors and run through walls...
(morning thinking)
I want to take myself off to a monastery. I want to go on a long retreat. I want solitude. These wants are making it hard to find peace where I am. I can see that I am placing idealised peace somewhere else. In doing so I’m creating distances that I can not currently cross and choosing to move contentment out of reach. The wanting of peace in the future obfuscates the path to peace in the present.Â
Let it go for now Paul. Better to enjoy what moments of tranquility you already have.
I’m fond of thinking that when Gus is older, when he’s left home, I’ll take some time away and go on an extended retreat. Maybe in a monastery or ashram. Learn a new skill or refine an existing one. Study under a wise teacher. Go to the house in North Uist or, as I’ve been threatening/promising myself since my twenties, take to the road and wander as a hobo for a bit. This last is one of my favourite fantasies. I start walking with a pack on my back and keep going. Sleep in hedge rows, cook beans in their tin, jump rides on open freight trains that don’t exist in this century or country. Idealised anachronistic fantasies.
I’d like some version of this persistent daydream one day, but not until my son is grown and without forgetting that I’m in a loving relationship that sustains and nourishes me.
My ability to be comfortable away from my family maxes out at about three weeks. After 20 days or so the longing to be near them, sharing chocolate bars with legs criss crossed on the couch, becomes so strong that it’ll pull me bodily, stronger than gravity along motorways or through airport security. It’s at those times that I marvel at the physical strength and inevitability of love and the pointlessness of fighting against it. From three weeks away I’d knock down doors and run through walls to be home.
Still I daydream about effing off on my own.Â
I get out of bed fairly routinely at twenty past five. Not because I’m a productivity focused 5am club acolyte with CEO aspirations looking to Get Shit Done. I like the peace and quiet. I like the alone time. The cat and I stretch while the kettle boils, take coffee to my desk and write. When I’ve run out of words I move to the armchair and read. The cat joins me here too. Eventually my family will wake up and we sit together at the kitchen table. This first hour or two of gentle purpose and personal stillness sustains me through the day. Until such time as I can get away on my own, this is my monastery.Â
I’ve never lived on my own. I left my four person one dog, childhood home and moved into a five person Edinburgh flat (with a turret!) and lived in shared flats through my twenties until I married and my wife and I made our first home together. We were eventually joined, in our current home, by Gus and then Juno (cat). So I've never lived alone with a replete sufficiency of personal time. I look at friends who have or had places of their own with an envy that is unbecoming of a man who thinks about peace and contentment. Envy is such a manky feeling. Maybe it’s a nostalgic longing rather than envy.
My son is ten. I’ll be in my mid fifties at this notional point in the future when my life is such that I’ve deemed it acceptable to take some time out on my own and think about the world, my world, my place in it, how I got to where I am (will be) and why I am who I are or might be.
Wanting disturbs serenity. Serenity comes from a contentment with things as they are, acceptance of our situation as it is. I can love and value the things I have now. They were once things I wanted and longed for. Serenity has, so far, been fleeting. It lasts longer when I accept that the moment will pass.Â
Contentment is the willing acceptance of what is. Does serenity come from extended, continued and reliable, contentment?
I’ve been to some talks in the Book Festival at the point where the host opens the conversation to the floor and invites questions I’ve had things I’d like to know. Clarification or expansion. I’ve felt probably no-one else wants to know these things and perhaps, almost certainly, my questions are silly. I’ve not raised my hand. I suspect I’ve been foolish. I need to learn to raise my hand and ask the questions.
Questions build knowledge and community don’t they? We should always just ask I think. We can always just ask. They’re always telling us there’s no silly questions.
If you have any questions that might improve my own questions or any questions that are entirely your own questions, you can easy peasy message me. That’s how we’ll get answers isn’t it?
Comment below or email or call. Let’s have coffee or sit on the beach. We could go for a walk where trees and views are, or roll about on our bikes stopping every now and then for a breathless exchange of ideas. We could paddle out through white water and bob about out back in the swell, blethering until we catch our waves.
I’m keen on solitude but I’m also super into sharing it with you.
Thanks for reading. Glad you do. Please come again.
Freedom and security, like Sarah says, the tension is always there. Finding ways to manage both, without threatening the other, is what many of us try to do. You sound to be doing a good job of it now - no need for fantasy retreats!
Ah Paul, I think you describe an aspect of the ‘human condition’ really well - the tension between the need for space and the need for connection.
I once went on a pilgrimage to find myself again - it was wonderful and so hard to come back. I cried. I hated it. And I asked a wise man who had done it before me how he coped. He told me that I had had a liminal experience and the trick was to figure out how to bring some of it with me into the humdrum of every day. It sounds as though you’re already managing that…