Distraction

The Easter weekend. Take a break from your narrative of the experience in the room, though plenty more to tell. Return to the real world of your life in this other room in Leeds.

Nicky was away for the weekend, on a Vipassana retreat. Good for her. I miss her when she’s not around. When she is, I look forward to her going. It rained lots and I sat inside and couldn’t think of anything to do. So little appeals. Even if it wasn’t raining, same rules apply. I looked at my mind. What I saw was fear.

Everything I think of doing is distraction. Reading, watching something, eating. It’s all an attempt to get away from what lurks on the other side of conscious thought. What lurks there, I believe, is good – but I’m afraid to go into it. I know the smart thing would be to sit and meditate, but I can’t. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to go into it.

But what turmoil when you know every single thing you think to do is just an escape. And all the time the power those things hold over me continues to die…

The world has no appeal. The material world. The things other people do. Shopping. Going out for meals. Watching TV. I know it’s all distraction and serves me not, and so I avoid it. But then where do I dwell? For I avoid the spiritual world too. I’m stuck here in limbo.

Thank God for sport. I wonder how long that’ll continue to sustain me?

Treading water. Not knowing that I’m actually just slowly drowning. And that drowning would be good. But perhaps this is the only way – to exhaust oneself, use up every last bit of the fight – to taste every last avenue of distraction – before finally giving in, well and truly surrendered. No forced surrender but actual surrender, when there is no other choice.

The other thing I’m afraid of is love. Nicky returns all full of purity, and in her absence I have dwelled on the ways I have treated her more poorly than she deserves, and I feel bad. But I cannot let her love me – and maybe because of her Vipassana energy, I cannot hide it or deny it anymore. Her touch reveals my shield, my enforced distance. I know I’m doing it – almost consciously doing it – but I don’t know how to let it drop. Love is scary. Like the light that lies beyond my thinking mind is scary. They are the best and most terrifying things I can think of.

Love. Who’s afraid of love?

I am.

But why? What’s to be afraid of?

Vulnerability. Openness. The letting down of my guard. Merging.

Love is egoless. Love is death.

The vision of light beyond my thoughts is also death: death to the mind, death to the ego – and I don’t want that because, as far as I’m perhaps ignorantly concerned, that’s what I am.

The road winds on, and the trip continues, and as we near our destination…it is a conveyor belt that we are on, and though I grasp at passing branches and hold them tight to slow my journey, prevent the inevitable, the grip they have on me is not strong enough to postpone it long. Try, again, another branch – but I am, alas, running out of branches.

Avoidance of the material world and avoidance of the spiritual. A man in limbo, in no man’s land. What it feels like is a loser’s land – but I guess that’s a judgment shaped by the outside (Buddha was a homeless madman – but I’m no Buddha).

Still, there’s the other part that longs for it – the other part that makes stupid bargains like, okay, we won’t sit for even five or ten minutes and meditate here and now, when that’s what we’re crying out to do – we’ll eat our tenth cheese sandwich – we’ll watch again some comedy we’ve already seen five times – what we’ll do is one day in the distant future, when everything’s exhausted and we’ve worked our way free of women and responsibilities and jobs – we’ll take ourselves off and disappear into the canyon or a monastery somewhere out East. And then, boy, we’ll really go for it! No, five minutes may be beyond us now – but sure we’ll manage five years easily then, and make it.

What folly. What silly bargains I swallow from my brain. Yet more distraction.

Distant plans and deals and dreams. They currently go something like this: finish the MA and then probably never chase wanting to be a writer again (stick to good old simple blogging, if anything at all); do that football coaching thing and the refereeing thing September to December and maybe find out that’s something that really satisfies or more than likely find out it’s just another thing – and maybe a last thing – to tick off the list; and in July and August we’ll be free to fly to Canada and sneak into the States; and in December, after the coaching commitment is satisfied, and just before the Mayan calendar ends, we’ll be free to fly off from England forever and ensconce ourselves in the canyon and there, finally, really get down to it.

Oh boy. Future fantasies. More distractions. More daft thoughts.

And where woman in all this? Where family? Just running away from it, that’s where. No desire for human love, for Earthly life. Commitments and growing old in a twenty-first century UK stylee massively unappealing. Dawning realisation that Rory no good for that kind of world: for mortgages and babies and doing things to make another human being happy, bringing her flowers and taking her out to dinner and compliments and stuff like that. Sex is weird. Faces are weird. I can’t fall in love with a human because they look strange and say strange things. They want me to do strange things too, and I’ll have to do them otherwise I’ll be bad.

No wonder freedom and keeping one’s options open and pie-in-the-sky dreams of escape and some other realm. But is that other realm even true? For more and more it feels like fantasy – but then maybe that’s just the effect of living in heavy concrete England, all the weight of its history and secularity and material celebrity-worshipping boozed-up mindset pressing down on me. Life is for shopping, for getting laid, for the clothes you wear and the car you drive and the size of your TV. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that what it all comes down to is the pension you stash and the state of the economy and getting rid of your children. On and on and on…

Was it real? Memory says so. Must get back to it, one of these days.

Though Dawkins says otherwise. He knows best. Me just lone weird voice can’t find no meaning in modern city civilisation, probably just standard depressed person unable to appreciate the joys of buying clothes, TVs, drinking beer.

Weirdo.

No. Me not that. Me on edge, at crisis point. But gentle crisis. Like butterfly. Like butterfly fighting to stay in cocoon, even as the cocoon rots all around him, constrains him, starts to hurt.

Like foetus grasping onto womb. But whoever heard of a foetus that didn’t come out?

I got an interesting email the other day. It was interesting because it was from John Milton, my Colorado/Mexico spiritual teacher/shaman, and it was interesting because he never, ever writes back to me. I’ve written him dozens of times, probably, over the years. Some of them have been quite heartfelt. Some of them have been massively apologetic, looking back on our times together, on how mad I got myself, on opportunities lost. And he never replied to those. Only time he did reply to me was when I was contemplating going to Peru in 2009 and asking him about Ayuahasca – he said something about not recommending plant-based drugs, which is what he’d always said to me (“you don’t need them where you’re going”) – and then this one the other day. Sure, I’d written to him first, but it sure was something…

What I’d written was that I was thinking of coming to Colorado in the summer. I said, of course this would involve me sneaking in from the woods in Canada but I feel kind of good about that. What I was thinking was that, if it was really a bad idea he’d probably say something about it, warn me off as he’d done with the Ayuahasca. But instead he got back to me real prompt and said, sure, I’ll be here x dates, you’ll be welcome to camp. I couldn’t believe it! So warm and open after all these years of silence. And that got me thinking…

Last year when I was considering it – when I was fair burning for it, checking plane tickets like every day – I ended up tossing an I Ching and the I Ching said a load of stuff about “not seeing daylight” and “laws must be obeyed” and “stop being so stupid” (maybe not that last one) and I basically thought, oo-er, I’m going to get arrested. Or, more likely, the I Ching is using that imagery to say, no, it’s not a good time for this. And it turned out to be perfect, of course – I applied instead for Leeds, and won the bursary for the Master’s, and got with Nicky – and then got into refereeing and this coaching thing and playing lots of squash – and despite everything that I might have said above, which seems a bit bemoaning and dowdy, it’s been a very happy and good and learning time and I couldn’t imagine things having worked out better. Like I say, even the drowning is good, right? It’s only the taking away of things that don’t mean much in the grand scheme.

But now this. A new year and a whole new feel of things. Life set, so therefore no grand giving up or escape: I’ve still got a university deadline for September and then the coaching commitment September to December. It’s not like I’m leaping off into the wide unknown. And yet, July and August have presented themselves as totally free. Nothing occurs in that time. The football season is over, the refereeing on hold. It’s summer: the perfect time for a walk in the woods. It’s a window.

I guess we’ll see. I guess we’ll toss the I Ching and see what plane tickets are on offer when the time comes. And then we’ll do one thing or the other.

John Milton. Holy Crestone. And Shawn and California and those roads. I long for it. I think there’s magic out there. I’d love to experience it again. And no doubt if I hadn’t been such an arse back in 2000 and 2001, I would’ve done by now.

Either that or it’s just another ticking off the list. Is perhaps my path merely the path of tasting everything until there’s nothing left to taste but my Self?

That’s the week, I guess. Those are the words that occur to me to type. Sure, there was refereeing and eating and somewhat interesting occurrences – but you can take all that as a given (main things were losing the hundred-and-forty quid car key for Nicky’s brand new Mini – and then having it turn up at the police station – and an interesting meeting with good old Laura, in which I saw ‘the light’).

Anyways. That’s enough.

Cheers! :-)