Life pushes you in certain unusual, unpredictable, unspecified directions sometimes. I’m not exactly sure what convinced me to stand guard as Jonathan etched “tricks”, his infamous graffiti tag, onto the upstairs window of a South London bus when we were in our early teens, and with a stone on a stick which looked like an oversized concrete lollipop. Who knows what convinced me: probably Jonathan. I don’t even really know what possessed me to quit my job and travel in 2014. And when I did, why I ending up staying in Mexico for most of my trip, and spend a large part of that, instead of exploring the cenotes of Quintana Roo, stuck in a touristic cocktail bar places preposterous in-play bets on obscure, women’s volleyball games.
I don’t even really
know why I don’t like chocolate ice cream even though I like chocolate, or why
I dribble when I sleep, and drool when I talk and just why there’s quite so
much saliva in my mouth at any given moment. And I don’t know why I’m single. I
can give proximate, causal descriptions of why I think I am: I don’t have many
opportunities living in Korea; I’m terribly picky; potential spouses tend to
keep chocolate ice cream in their freezers, but ultimately, fundamentally, when
all is said and done, why are any of these things true? Why did things turn out
quite like this? Ultimate explanations,
when all is said and done, just fail you. You’re just left scratching your
head, on the sofa staring at advertisements for chocolate ice cream thinking
that “there is no getting behind a given fact”. The chocolate chips fall where
they may and we’re all just left picking up the pieces.
And so 20 years after standing guard for Jonathan, I stood guard for Lord Buddha – metaphorically speaking - dressed from head to toe in loaned white clothing, in a monastery in Northern Thailand, walking slower than I thought possible, back and forwards over the same 5 metre-stretch of temple stone, over a period of up to 45 minutes at a time, and paying excruciatingly specific attention to my feet. White-cotton clad foreigners usually on an 11 or 26-day course, ‘novices’ (actually very experienced meditators) along with Thais on shorter stays, as well as shaved-headed nuns, and a sprinkling of monks circled the large stupor of Wat Ram Poeng, said to contain holy relics from notable leaders of bygone eras within its spiritual belly. Wat Ram Poeng, a traditional establishment, teaching a conservative interpretation within the Theravada school of Buddhism teaches 2 types of meditation to be followed by its guests.
First, there’s the walking meditation. ‘Walking’, in this
context is a very generous term for the practice. Walking, a kind of
purposeful stride to go from location A to place B is most often performed at a
certain minimum speed. Slow walkers and dawdlers might frustrate more
respectable walkers in an airport terminal or on a city street, but they’re
usually operating at a certain speed which is qualifying of the name. The
‘walking’ meditation at Wat Ram Poeng, however, consists of moving no quicker than
one can pay attention to the sensations under one’s foot, meaning that walking
meditators often resemble a bad improv performer doing a slow-mo routine where
they neglect to actually move anywhere at all.
But there’s method to
the madness: Considering most people’s attention span is spasmodic and
ill-refined in the age of distraction when one does actually pay attention to
something as seemingly as trivial as one’s foot, paying close attention, to all
the sensations of temperature, pressure, and other somatosensory stimuli, can actually be rather pleasurable, addictive even. I found myself wanting more and more. It certainly makes sense that the appropriate speed for an
activity aimed to tune-up attention- is close to nonmotile. And indeed, some of
the more ‘advanced’ meditation practitioners on the course, the one’s very
serious about the vow of silence and the refinement of their own attention,
could often be seen moving so slowly that they became the perfect statue for
the more adventurous tourist stumbling into the temple, camera in hand, with an
air of devilish, gleeful befuddlement. In the race that is walking meditation,
the winners always finish last.
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| walking meditators |
I’d been interested in meditation for a while, have a couple
of meditation apps on my phone and have taken a passing interest in its
practical benefits and its lessons on the nature of consciousness. But there
was obvious causation, no linear progression or signposting to be detected from
anything that’d happened heretofore in the coil of my mortal existence. Not the
bus, nor the travelling, not my occasional morning meditations stoked by
personal existential crises. Nothing could have led me quite so directly to be
staring at my own feet, to the morning prayers, the prostrating to Lord Buddha,
the surreal night-time ceremonies. Everything just seemed to happen as it did,
and keeps happening that way. It’s all deeply beautifully, chaotically, maddeningly bewitchingly inscrutable.
It’s therefore quite humbling to ponder that even with
logically-deduced, well-thought-out and rational plan for one’s future, a healthy diet and a network of rich, meaningful relationships, there’s no way
you can say whether or not you’re going to end up sailing the world in a
rowboat, making a million dollars, or naked in a skip bellowing out a pitch-perfect rendition of "My Heart Will Go On" with a red workman’s cone
on your head. It’s simultaneously exciting, liberating and terrifying. You’re
not in control of anything, no matter how organised your sock drawer is.
Depending on the time of day, the stupa, which acted as a noteworthy
centrepiece of the temple and looked like a large golden upside-down spinning
top, would either resemble the grounds of a psychiatric ward (in the afternoon),
with its patients seemingly frozen in time, attempting to make sense of their
own existence, or a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie with the artificial
light of the temple lights bouncing of the porcelain white of the living dead
in the quadrant, or a group of demented patients failing to remember their home
address and getting stuck in a hedge in the Borgesian vagueries of dusk.
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| The magnificent stupa |
The days would start at 4.00 am with the ringing of a bell
at a gradually quickening tempo which made me think that I was always late to
the chanting beginning at 4.30 am in the library, despite usually arriving by
4.25 am. The ‘library’ was a library only in the sense that it had some books
in bookcases around the sides, and in the sense that people were shuffling
around staring at their own feet without actually reading, but not in the sense
that it had a shrine, a large female Buddha statue with a Wheel of Dharma
headdress, or a sleepy monk chanting the 8 Precepts. I’ve never seen such
behaviour in a South London library except for the time a homeless gentleman
took up tenure in the Fantasy books aisle in Penge library and made a sort-of
shrine (more of a bed) to Terry Pratchet and Philip Pullman.
The monk in question’s name is Phra Ajahn Along, as in the
sentence: “come Along now; stop
talking and say your fucking prayers,” and this young lieutenant appeared to be
second in command at Wat Ram Poeng. He is an austere, astringent man, a-comical
man with a large shaven head and no eyebrows, providing an inflated sense of an
actually quite slight stature. He looked like a monk version of those plastic
childhood bobblehead toys with a tiny homuncular body and oversized head.
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| Phra Ajahn Along (taken from the Wat Ram Poeng Facebook page) |
The teacher meetings took place daily, usually in the afternoons in ‘the teacher’s office’. The teacher’s office looks less like a teacher’s office than the library resembles a library. It looks less like the office a school teacher might use and more like an ubosot or any other large ordination hall for worship, with an ornamented, double-tiered mahogany roof, decorative golden finials, spiked stone columns outside on top of which mythological protectors sit on stone pillars, fortifying the holy inner chambers of the temple which contained a golden statue of Lord Buddha, flowers, and other decorative elements. The office and other temple buildings are also provided with a suitably lush backdrop: the Golden Rain Trees and Sacred Fig Trees cushioning the building’s outer walls would be able to prettify any postcard sold in the souvenir shops of Chiang Mai. Incidentally, the whole wat or temple complex is equally lavish. Elegant chedis (cone-shaped pagodas), resplendent bell-towers, imposing nagas (mythical snakes) running along balustrades, grandiose temple archways, large viharns (assembly halls) where monks chant in formidable private ceremonies. No doubt a veritable paradise for the silent contemplative, a hellish torture for the gregarious socialite, a place of curiosity for the off-piste traveller, and an intriguing mixture of all three for those participants, baffled enough by their own minds, to have signed up in the first place.
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| My photo doesn't quite do the teacher's office justice |
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| Nagas outside of of the viharns (assembly halls) |
And all of this immersed in the lushest of fauna and flora.
During my time I saw a black-throated sunbird inserting its curved beaks into the
waxy dark red flesh of a closed Roselle flower, used for sweet juice drinks and
tea by the locals. I saw wood pigeons shoot off of the temple spires and onto
the large, fibrous leaves of the ‘Giant Elephant Ear’ plant. I saw monks with
coarse bamboo brushes tidy the grounds of a huge Bodhi tree stood proudly at
the rear of the temple, wrapped in holy cloth and adorned with relics and, of course,
a golden Buddha statue at its very foundation. And then there were the rich,
ever-changing sounds of the temple grounds. Sounds mostly of the males of
various species, quite ironically, tempt females to mate with them, in a place
where we were told on multiple occasions, that sex – at least human sex – is
definitely off of the agenda. One can hear the nonchalant croaking of frogs which
occupy the large ceramic basins where lily pads provide safe cover from the
elements. And occasionally, the distant bleating of a superannuated scooter
whose misfiring engine should’ve been sold for scrap a long time ago.
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A wood pigeon used by birds and local semi-stray dogs alike, teeming with tadpoles.
|
By far the most distinctive noise of the whole place, though,
was that of the Asian Koel. It looks like a slightly more despicable version of
the Common Raven (crow) found across the Northern Hemisphere. The kind you
might find eaten worms in your garden, stealing buttons of your favourite shirt
or hatching a plan to undermine the foundations of your species democracy on
Youtube. Despicable mostly because of its blood-red eyes and a curved beige
beak. It sounds a bit like a slowed down car alarm or insecure child calling
his mother because he got lost in his own bedroom. The bird releases up to
around 15 timorous chirps in one go before fluttering off unconvincingly to ornament
a steeple or ancient tree branch or another.
For a noise which sounds like an incompetent, chronically
depressed frozen foods store manager locked in his own walk-in refrigerator - a
monotonous help, help, help! – cry, it sure is loud. Each cry could be likened
to some insecure plea for reassurance – “Do you love me?”, “Do my feathers make
me look fat?” “Am I being too noisy?” No, little pea fly, you’re perfect just
the way you are. In a stupor, next to the stupa, on many an occasion, other
birdsong became anthropomorphised in the drowsy fog of endless meditation in
the afternoon heat. Catchy ditties recirculated in messy streams of thought as birdsong
awoke me from my stupefaction. “What’re you doing? What’re you doing? What’re
you doing?” sang a bird, the upwardly inflective interrogative recapitulating
in my head. “Meditating! Meditating Meditating!” the hazy half-light of my
subconscious replied before realising it was the product of another reality of
some sorts and allowing my conscious mind to take the reins and correctly
identify the feeling of shards of broken glass in my lower back.
Back to Along. Phra Ajahn Along isn’t his actual name. Part
of his actual name is Along (spelt only as I’ve heard it spoken, not as it’s
probably written). Phra means ‘monk’ and Ajahn means ‘teacher’. Monk Teacher
Along and his handsome yet deeply sullen hairless head would peer at you inside
the beautified walls of the teacher’s office, along with Phra Ajahn Supan, the
bigwig of the whole wat. Along very rarely smiled, certainly never
spontaneously, and usually, it’s only ever a sort of proto-smile released when
he seemed content with the profundity of wisdom he was conveying on the
uneducated masses, painstakingly, 1 at a time, for 3 hours every day. Along had
a habit of looking upon you, walleyed, without a flicker of emotion, his
perfectly smooth, timeless skin giving no indication of age (although I’d guess
he was in his late 20’s).
The Chosen One, The Golden Child, awaiting his turn on the throne, operated according to different rules of human interaction. Groups of males and females were scheduled to attend meetings from 3 pm or 4 pm each day and would wait, in groups, in silence, in comfortable antique chairs which were in stark contrast to the cheap, plastic read ones omnipresent around the wat. Those waiting would have no choice but to listen in on the progress, or lack thereof, of one's fellow meditators, and Along would have no choice but to recycle a reliable reservoir of sagacious parables and other tidbits of wisdom to the countless masses whose faces had merged into an unidentifiable hopeless blur of clueless foreigners seeking enlightenment.
The Chosen One, The Golden Child, awaiting his turn on the throne, operated according to different rules of human interaction. Groups of males and females were scheduled to attend meetings from 3 pm or 4 pm each day and would wait, in groups, in silence, in comfortable antique chairs which were in stark contrast to the cheap, plastic read ones omnipresent around the wat. Those waiting would have no choice but to listen in on the progress, or lack thereof, of one's fellow meditators, and Along would have no choice but to recycle a reliable reservoir of sagacious parables and other tidbits of wisdom to the countless masses whose faces had merged into an unidentifiable hopeless blur of clueless foreigners seeking enlightenment.
Our protagonist Phra Ajahn Along sat up high, his big
fascinating head atop his marginally less fascinating, diminutive, orange
robe-covered body, regally, resplendently, like Henry VI about to execute one
of his wives, on a high perch overlooking you, as you kneeled, uncomfortably
with your thighs horizontal, sitting back on your own heels. By the time Along
got into the meat and potatoes of his circumspection, a tsunami of liquid magma
was circulating scalding daggers in my knees which served only as a minor
distraction to the sensation of one’s toes splitting off from the top of the
foot at their seams. The act of prostration, bowing 3 times both to Lord Buddha
and then to Phra Ajahn Along was very much welcomed not as a cathartic form of
worship but as a temporary reprieve to the knee-snapping discomfort.
Although others seemed
to strike up a more fruitful relationship with Along, he was a divisive
character whose talking style leaned toward the repetitive “you have a hand,
look at it, it is real…,” and who, perhaps quite understandably, seemed bored
to be delivering variants of the same message 3 hours per day every day, to an
audience of travellers unfamiliar with the nuances of his faith. When I told
Along about my back pain, he said pain is just another object of mind. When I
told Suphan, he told me that pain is an object of mind. Somehow this made the
pain worse.
Along told me that if somebody came to try and kill him, he
wouldn’t resist, he would accept his fate, as everything is as it should be. He
also told me, when I asked, that he wasn’t attached to anything, and although
he wouldn’t admit it, he seemed really attached to this whole Buddhism thing. He
then told me to look at his hand and fell asleep. Along was ardent, steadfast
and dutiful in his beliefs and actions, and he, at times, especially when
referencing the wisdom of Lord Buddha, reminded me of any religious ideologue.
Being in conversation with Along, as well as the acerbic, straight-talking nun
at the front desk, was a reality check that this place isn’t a hippy-dippy
place to meander through the curious crevices of consciousness, but another
dogmatic religion like Christianity, Islam or any other you’d care to name.
At the same time, somebody acting entirely in accordance
with his beliefs wasn’t to be dismissed or shirked at, belittled or made fun
of. I often left Along’s office not inspired by the sagacity of his word or the
grace of his character but by a profound sense of human potential given the
prerequisite beliefs. What else could make a clearly exhausted man wake up at 4
am every morning, having meditated all the previous morning noon and night, to lead
a bunch of clueless beginners, who don’t even understand a word of the Pali language that the prayers are conducted in, and not want to just chuck it all
in and renounce religion right then and there?
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| Phra Ajahn Suphan (taken from the Wat Ram Poeng Facebook page) |
His line manager
(although I don’t think they call it that) was Suphan who was more visible
around the temple. His smiling face adorned the temple’s only billboard where
he could be seen cutting a monk’s hair. He could often be heard over the
temple’s various loudspeakers, especially on special occasions like the oft-occurring
‘Buddha day’ (on each half moon, full moon, new moon, three-quarter moon,
cheese moon, Keith Moon and chocolate gateaux moon), where he’d give murmuring,
chuckle-laden speeches, holding the microphone a little too close to his face,
like an affable granddad with a few too many white wines in him, embarrassed but
chipper about forgetting the trivial details of whose house he was actually in.
He gave the impression that he was enjoying what he was saying more than his
audience, at least more than his English-speaking audience who didn’t have a
clue what he was saying, except on the rare few occasions when in his dharma
talks, before the Buddha day ceremony in the large ordination hall, he brought
up in asynchronous subjects of artificial intelligence and the novel Coronavirus
in adjacent breaths.
More constructive conversations could be found in talking to
a lowlier, yet more avuncular and altogether more approachable monk such as Phra Sookido, who was chatty and held a smile which warmed one’s cockles and could always,
be found sweeping in the early afternoons near the library. Wisdom could be found
in these smaller moments, like the eccentric ramblings of a bantamweight monk,
name unknown, who on the night before our release accosted us with a large
kitchen knife he was using to deracinate weeds from the potted garden plants. The
little excitable fellow raised his arms to the heavens, gesticulating with
great energy as he shimmied from one way to the next, and crouched down holding
his head – and knife – aloft, in his own charismatic way, like an excitable
golem as he regaled us with stories of the best ways to live a humble life.
It’s no wonder two other meditators who had been on the walk
with us and didn’t realise the monk was holding an audience with us until they
were halfway towards the stupa, thought we were being apprehended for making
too much noise. “Don’t cry before you hurt,” the monk said, compelling us not
to overthink problems until there is one. “Knowing, knowing, knowing,” he
repeated, bouncing up and down on his toes, in between chaotic darts, offering
us advice on how to ground ourselves if we’re ever feeling detached or
ungrounded. These were invaluable insights, more than I ever got from Suphan or
Along, but which perhaps didn’t require the full 90-minute operetta that we
felt obliged to kindly accept as monastery guests.
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| The beautiful soul, Machee Suli |
The food was fantastic if samey, vegetarian-friendly. The
accommodation scarce and the men’s rooms like petite alpine chalets from the
outside and spartan bivouac huts on the inside. They were still better than the
female accommodation located behind the food waste bins next to the temple’s
kitchen. Women had fewer privileges than men, something which made itself
apparent often. Women entered the Buddha Day ceremonies after the men, they
weren’t allowed on the first step of the stupa, and they sat with the masses of
female Thai visitors to the temple, whereas men got their own private area near
the monks. This impression crystallised most clearly when on the third day Machee
Suli (‘Machee’ meaning Nun), a selfless, kindly nun on the front desk who was
later to be replaced by her evil doppelganger, a cold, indifferent nun,
informed us that we could attend a meeting with a returning female teacher if
we wished.
As I entered the teacher’s office to meet Phra Ajarn Agayani,
returning after a long-standing back injury, I was instead met by Along,
sweeping the outskirts of the teacher’s office. Along informed me that this
wasn’t where she was and that I should ask Machee Suli in the Foreign
Meditator’s Office. Agayani’s office had no nagas, balustrades, double tired
roofs, pagodas or balconies. It was a small outhouse near the kitchen. By no
means squalid, it was nice enough with a small waiting area partitioned off
from the well-decorated and homely interior of the room by a sliding door. But
sitting with Agayani, you got the sense of being in your favourite aunt’s
living room chattering about one’s ailments, rather than knelt rigidly in the
main office, shouldering the burden of the wisdom of the ages being passed down
by a supercilious monk, only to be received by your thin, undeserving wrists
and svelte shoulders.
Many students transferred to Agayani’s morning session in
the shed rather than visiting Suphan’s stately drawing room in the afternoons.
Although, being a product of the monastery and that particular flavour of
traditional Theravada Buddhism, I was able to speak to Agayani, to the eternal
frustration of those waiting outside the office partition, for a substantial
period, especially about the chronic back pain which had plagued her for many
years, but which she’d overcome despite doctor’s advice for surgery and strong
medication, using the power of mind. Words I was especially keen to hear given
my own, relatively trivial, back problems on retreat. “The pain is good. You
need pain,” she said magnanimously, imploring me to go deeper in the
exploration of negative sensation I was experiencing. Her shaven head and kind black
button-like eyes emanated kindness, like a cosy puppet in an Oliver Postgate
animation. She surpassed, in this sense, the temple’s patriarchs, both Ajahn’s amiable
articulations and Along’s austere astringency.
Your monkey mind, despite being asked to take a break from
active duty looks for things to do in any event. Just like a police officer
caught up in a media furore and put on indefinite paid leave but who can’t help
spending his downtime pruning the wife’s rhododendrons to within an inch of
their bulbs. The monkey mind is like a wild, never-before ridden rollercoaster,
which takes you unknown terrain at unpredictable speeds and you’re not sure
when it’ll actually return. And there are no height restrictions or seat belts.
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| Monkey mind reprieve: placing a bouquet on the stupa during a Buddha Day ceremony |
A thought might arise about a hobby of mine, perhaps about a
certain move in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. This then soon becomes an extravagant
animated Spike Jonze short where the protagonist, me, is winning regional
competitions and donating the prize money to charity, a selfless hero in a
movie only ever played once to its maker. The flickering hint of a thought
about my back pain then arises shortly afterwards, and the rollercoaster is
soon zipping and whirling through dense forest overgrowth as I contemplate a
life of disability, unable to ever properly meditate again. Another thought
then arises: a fleeting positive disposition toward a fellow meditator, and
soon the thought-coaster is whizzing past alpine slopes as the monkey,
calculator in hand, autistically tabulates all of the meditator’s good and bad
traits, and analyses every – entirely silent – proto-interaction that we’ve
ever had. What a crazy, unnecessary, sadistic ride. This is why
Agayani was reported to have said that 15 minutes of talking is equivalent to
one hour’s lost meditation: it revs the rollercoaster’s engine and tantalises
its thrusters. The monkey mind is suspended with full-pay only to be promised a
promotion and given a tour of head office.
The monkey, strapped tightly into The Runaway Train fixated
on an appealing young lady on the first few days of the experiment in human
psychology before it found out – on its entrepreneurial travels - that the lady
in question was, in fact, dating one of the camps blabbermouths, of which there
were two, an American she met at a previous retreat and whose sinusitis –
presumably – was responsible for the grating series of grunt, snorts and coughs
he unceremoniously bestowed upon his meditation mates. Some things such as
ticks brought about through medical conditions cannot be helped and should not
be criticised, although other things, such as his fondness for humming 1970’s
Soul anthem “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder, could have been helped and can
rightly be open to censure.
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| A meditation hotspot, opposite the stupa |
By day 6 or 7 I was looking out for the new object of my thinking brain’s affections, an Australian girl never far from the barrel of a Chinese guy’s shutter lens, a fellow meditator with a penchant for falling asleep during meditation – and, along with his compatriot with which he was sailing the word it transpired, in a 40-foot Dutch sailing boat, a thoroughly lovely, dare I say inspiring, guy.
My mind began to wonder the Mediterranean-looking lady was sitting at lunch, it found itself content when it noticed she was meditating in close proximity around the stupa and found itself pondering where the hell she was when she wasn’t. Meditating, she appeared like a bronzed statue, the evening sun lighting up her olive skin like Helen of Troy, and the slight upturning of her chin and lips, adding to the elegance, ease and grace at which she appeared to be excelling in the art. She was majestic and I –or at least the overthinking part of my primitive monkey brain – was captivated.
This is why I marked it as a minor success when on the
second Buddha day ceremony, when we were all required to gather at the Foreign
Meditation Office brandishing a small selection box of artificial flowers, candles;
I caught her attention passing by and engaged her in a brief, frivolous chat. And
then on Day 10, we found ourselves having a sit-down chat in the female dining
area after the ‘closing ceremony’ when everyone had forgotten they were on a
silent meditation retreat and were gossiping about all and sundry. Imagine how
I was further counting my lucky stars when on Day 11, strapped into our
backpacks, we found ourselves half a mile down the road in an exuberant garden
café. The monkey mind found her to be an arresting, bewitching, Mediterranean
beauty. The intellect found her to be perspicacious, elegant, politically
engaged wonder. The gut listened but couldn’t do much for all the butterflies,
and the heart, tugged as it was, had no riposte to any of it.
Ecclesiastical philosophy has something to teach us here. No matter how much of the rights and wrongs,
laws of logic and rationality that you try to engage with, no matter how much you
might fight against some urge such as the fleeting and strong one of romantic
love, which itself arises unexplainably from the belly of infinity, sometimes
you just find yourself outside a nightclub, both of you in tears, desperately trying to
explain away the failure of human connection.
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| "We're all connected" 2 Chinese fellows, a Russian and an Aussie. Coffee shop friends. |
For all of one’s triumphs, achievements, accolades, awards,
good-looks or financial prosperity, we’re all highly imperfect human beings trying to make sense of ourselves in an indifferent
cosmos. And whether we’re in the presence of a beautiful temple, a heavily
vandalised London bus or weeping outside a Thai night club, tired and emotional
in the early hours of the morning, through connection, or failed attempts at it, we’re all just trying our best. “I have a gift for you,” said
Tie one of the Chinese guys sailing the world on his boat, as he handed me a
yellow candle in that café. “We’re all connected, but this when if you ever
feel like we’re not,” he said with a benevolent gaze, loading our bags into our
taxi and waving us into the distance. “Perhaps we can sail together one day,”.
Yes my friend, perhaps we will.
I plan to return to Wat Ram Poeng if I haven't been blacklisted as a chatterbox. The
insights are too profound, the grounds too scenic, the people too inspiring. It’s a majestic place that I’d recommend to anyone and everyone, even those
without an interest in meditation if only to leave after 2 days after having
experienced one of the surrealist, Lynchian experiences of their lives. You might
fall in love with meditation anyway. Or like me, fall in love. You might even learn to love people generally, their journeys, terrible failures and riveting highs, as well as those of your own.
And whether you find yourself next time in some terrible state of affairs, vandalising a bus, staring at one’s feet or sailing the world in a Dutch sailing boat, just remember that it’s all just happening, whether you like it or not. “It’s just a ride,” insisted Bill Hicks convincingly, so you might as well pay attention to what it feels like to be on the ride, as long as you are, because one day you’ll be kindly asked to get off. It’s better then, to see the impermanent, chaotic swirl of an unpredictable cosmos with wide eyes open than peer at it through half-closed lids with eyes wide shut, ready with the most finely attuned ears and slowest moving feet you can summon. Because this bird song, this back pain, this gruelling teacher’s meeting, this frog's mating call, this mock meat meal, this bivouac hut, this hand, this love, this heartbreak, this life, is all there ever is.
Namaste.
