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“Each of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself.
Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality.
In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself.
This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.”
- John O’Donoghue – from Eternal Echoes
Tommy and Hector (Tiernan and Ó hEochagáin, respectively, two well-known and beloved Irish comedians and TV hosts, for those of you not familiar) told a story about a friend or acquaintance of theirs on their incredibly funny and endearing podcast*. The man set off from Navan to walk to Castlerea (a walk of about 3 days) to visit his parents’ or grandparents’ graves. He told no-one, only informing his wife that he’d be “away for a few days”. He didn’t do it to raise money for charity or awareness of a disease or social media clout. As Hector – masterful storyteller that he is – concluded the tale:
“He went off for no other reason than to have an experience that only he could have.”
A few weeks ago I went for a long walk after a medium drive.
Why go for a walk? We’re all gone walking mad this last year. Thankfully I’ve been walking for a long time (since I was two years old) and so was not shocked to learn just last year that it’s good for you.
Keeps you fit? Sure. Good for mental health too, right? Heart-rate. Fitness. Metabolism. Superior cardio-vascular health! Endorphins! Dopamine! Walking is a medicine, a drug! Mental health = physical health.
Relaxed. Lowered cortisol. 10,000 steps. Less stress, more success. Fitter. Happier. More productive. That’s why we should all walk, isn’t it? To be healthier and happier? To see some nature, to travel, to socialise or to ‘clear the head’?
Maybe you walk just to get from A to B?!
No.
That’s not it at all. You should walk to practice walking. Why practice walking? Well, it is not to get ‘better’ at walking. Nor is it for physical health, or even ‘improvements to mental health’. Simply practice walking to practice walking. To walk alone is to spend time with yourself. The other benefits – and they are welcome benefits don’t get me wrong – are mere side effects.
Walk away from the world, for an hour or two or six just to spend time with yourself. To uncover yourself. You might enjoy it – and I hope you do, I certainly do, usually. But sometimes I suffer as well. It is painful. The first few kms of this 20km hike I was filled with seemingly unrelated anger and frustration. I couldn’t stop fidgeting a reaching for something in my backpack. Doing three trips back across the car park to the car to get something I’d forgotten, or to leave some excess baggage behind.
But I was simply tired and weary at being caught in limbo between the everyday world – and myself – which is more readily found alone and up on a mountain, undisturbed by anything or anyone else.
Happiness and wellness are fleeting. There are far more important things.
It is not about improvement to mental health or material circumstances – in fact, following your own path and intuition might lead to an apparent diminishment of these things, in the short term anyway. Spending time with yourself is a process of risk-taking and reflection – it won’t always make you happy.
But the only way you can be sure that what you think, feel, say and do is yours and yours alone, is by going out into the world and having experiences that only you can have.
Man can bear any how if he has a why, as the fella said. You can create your own ‘why’ in this way – in fact, there isn’t any other way. The ‘whys’ get given to you otherwise. We are all dying for something at the end of the day, and if we find out or admit to ourselves that we’re dying for something that someone else gave to us, and it’s not to our liking, then we wither away and die that bit faster, and our long slow lives and deaths turn from comedies to tragedies.
To choose your own why does not imply selfishness, as small and selfish minds might assume, but the opposite: the only way to have true compassion for others and their humanity is to understand your own. You are your only link to the human race and the natural world after all.
Until you start creating your own meaning, it is all external. Perhaps you find yourself back where you started doing all the things you were told were good for you, but at least now you know for sure and can claim them as your own. When you rely on the external – people, things, and even certain places – all of these can go in the blink of an eye. And sometimes, the two might look the same, internal and external meaning.
When you start uncovering your own self and the things you like and think and feel and believe in, it may not look like much is different. At times you’ll wonder why you’d bother, some choices might look like bigger mistakes than you’ve ever made – and they probably will be.
You’ll endure loneliness and regret and sometimes feel terribly – but at least these things will be yours. You’ll have earned all of it, but don’t think of that as a bad thing or a bitter wish upon you.
The discovery of the self is not something can be measured, sold, replicated, taught or learned. Other than by doing. This turns many people off, particularly the more logical or goal-oriented of us – and I think modern society rewards this approach: Only that which can be measured, improved – and sold – is of any value. That which can be scientifically observed and replicated.
But observation and replication kills things, and statistical significance may be of no significance to me or you.
These things bring the real you out of you, for better or worse. And that is the whole point of them. Not to compare times or results with anyone else. You are taken out of the comfort of your ordinary environment (space) and routine (time), and removed from the safety and supports and structure and scaffolding of your world (culture) you operate as if suspended in space, to be examined – not scientifically but spiritually.
And is this all of this going your own way a good thing? Choosing to have new experiences, making a choice to be more yourself? Making a conscious decision to set out and move – and, therefore, think, as the body and mind are one, don’t forget – in your own unique way?
I would say not only is it good, it is vital, and an aspect of health overlooked – energising the spirit and increasing one’s life-force – because again, how do you measure that? You cannot compare it to someone else’s, only yours which was there before. It is either increased or depleted, though it never stays still, and just by attempting to move with it you are more likely to move with its rhythm. Remember, it is certainly not goal-oriented nor logical. Though I suspect it is something more and more people are looking for and searching for, particularly this past year and a half with the You-Know-What (even if people don’t yet know what it is they’re looking for or what’s driving their actions). We are all the same at the end of the day.
Because that’s what it’s all about really – why discovering or creating yourself is a desirable outcome – it’s how you empathise with others. You are human – so is everyone else. It is only through understanding yourself that you understand what it is to be human. It is not through wielding some contrived list of moral guidelines, which again *sound* nice but are more about making oneself feel and be seen to be ‘good’ (and intelligent, didn’t you look it up online all by yourself!) rather than being honest.
The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes the processes of integration and differentiation:
“The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus their attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer.”
What to do with this command of our attention?
By controlling our consciousness – making decisions for ourselves – we become more differentiated, that is: more uniquely ourselves. But paradoxically (or maybe intuitively, depending on how well-versed you are in philosophy) we simultaneously become more integrated, more like the rest of humanity – we transcend the limits of ourselves. This is not some selfish or arrogant goal – for when we go beyond ourselves where else can we go, but join with everyone else.
Or as the poet John O’Donoghue put it: to go out into the world (with others) is to lose part of yourself, and it is only by spending time alone that we regain ourselves again. But in discovering more of our own humanity we seek out that connection with others – and so the cycle repeats itself. Life is a balance between joining others and becoming ourselves, a never-ending cycle that in each iteration we find ourselves at once a different person, and more ourself than we ever were before.
We are all clouded by bias and conditioning. So many of our actions and reactions are unconscious. We are blind to them, just as you are deaf to a foreign language being spoken right beside you. All of this comes from the external. It is only by going inside ourselves that we practice stripping off those layers of conditioning, bit by bit.
The narrative our brains operate under to make sense of larger journeys and life events – the cycle of the Hero’s Journey as told across cultures and mythologies for millenia, relayed to us by Joseph Campbell – is remarkably similar to the micro-process through which individual skills are learned. Whether practicing taking free kicks, playing a song or travelling around the world, every iteration begins with the call to adventure.
Each call answered leads to a journey – each travel expedition or creative act, physical and mental journeys. A to B in a circle and back to where you began. From steady land to rocky waves and returning to sure ground; or from novice to master: the wise man is the one who acknowledges how much he has to learn and that he knows nothing at all.
To journey out beyond yourself and to master something new or bigger than you and what you know. The Hero answers the call, faces a challenge, goes beyond him/herself to overcome it and discovers hidden gold. This gold isn’t added knowledge but a subtraction of what he is not: an uncovering of who he was all along.
Someone without biases or conditioning; that is to say: someone who knows nothing.
We are all the same and every journey is the same, every story the same.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Every skill. Every cycle. Every trip. Every journey. Every adventure. Every story. Every life. Every day.
All a journey.
That’s why I go travelling, and that’s why I went for a walk.
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