New Year's Day 2014

Almost immediately after I woke up this morning the still small voice said "I" (or perhaps it said "You"), "will never hear from her again."

I hear it quite often. It is quiet, authoritative, without an emotional edge. It is not judgemental or despairing. Sometimes it tells me not to have another drink, to stop doing something, and I ignore it. There are no comebacks. Sometimes it makes quite banal, mundane suggestions, such as "Stop this now" or "Go for a walk". It seems completely real and trustworthy to me. If I ignore it, it doesn't mind - I may beat  myself up about ignoring it, but it never does.

When I heard it this morning, I was sad. Not despairing, or grief stricken (I've done enough of that in the last eight months). I just accepted that it was telling me the truth. Not practically or literally. There will inevitably be some sort of contact, about divorce, or property, or the stuff I've left behind, but that could just as easily be through a lawyer or accountant, or one of my step daughters, on her behalf. But there will be no loving, caring, engaged, email, or letter or phone call.

I was told recently about distinguishing between "coping" and "transforming". Coping is just accepting, putting up with, suffering patiently and willingly, or otherwise. To transform requires us to truly relax and then to enter in to our painful response and engage with it. I realise I have spent a lot of my life, and of the last ten years, coping, imagining that I was surrendering to the flow, being detached. In reality I was just putting my pain or frustration or anger or despair to one side, but not moving through it, engaging with it, and then leaving it behind. Hence perhaps my drinking - numbing myself to the great crowd of supplicants in the waiting room next door.

So I spent the day feeling needy and lonely, unloved. Little new year messages on Skype or Facebook or email seemingly ignored. I worked hard at researching for stories for the next issue of the Transition Free Press, all too aware of how ignorant I am of what has been happening in "the world of media" for the last eight months.

So, at some point, I did sit down to relax and enter this feeling, turn it round, see what else was there, what other perspectives I can take. I understand that in a way I've been living in a sort of daydream for years. Clinging to times of happiness and content, of joy, of deep love, of real companionship, but ignoring or glossing over times of misery and despair and deep loneliness. And then I look ahead. Freedom. A new start. A sort of rebirth. I found my self commenting on someone's blog on Inner Transition (what does resilience, sustainability, permaculture, living lightly, mean for the inner life we lead?). She talked of a cone - the individual at the top, then immediate family, then extended family, then community, then nature, land, the earth at the bottom. How each of these sustains us and when one layer fails, the other steps up. And that sometimes we only have the bottom - nature itself - to hold us. And I realised how much of the last eight months has been about rebuilding and repairing each of those parts of my cone. Finding a new community after 25 years in Wormingford and Coggeshall. Going back to my extended family. Staying close to my children. And experiencing nature, this island, deeply, slowly, and being fed and sustained by it. Just the sheer physical pleasure of bright sunlight and sea, plants and animals, this extraordinary landscape. And until I wrote that comment, and read the blog, I had not even realised this was happening.

I jumped into the abyss (a la Castaneda) on April 29, and entered another world. I’m still falling, or floating, or flying . . .

Meditation (and life) – work or play?

My life fell off a cliff about a month ago. I suppose this is the mysterious working of the Spirit, but it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time – in fact I was suddenly off that side of things in a big way, and today is the first time as I write this, that it has occurred to me that it might be (the working of the Spirit, that is). I have certainly been ‘held’, as they say, these last few weeks, not just by loved ones, mainly my children, who have been wonderful, but especially by the kindness of strangers. As I have been traveling by almost every means of transport I have met quite a number each day, and I can only think of two who were negative (as in deeply unpleasant). As it happens they were both English.
I left my Kindle on a ferry and was feeling rather bereft. A kind young Englishman, on his way to a conference on pests of potatoes and tomatoes (which are apparently related in some way) gave me his book, which he had just finished, called ‘Running with the Pack’ by a philosopher at Miami University called Mark Rowlands. He likes philosophising while doing long runs (10 to 30 miles) because he gets into a zone, or several zones, of consciousness, where thoughts just float up and by, a lot like meditation. Although the book is structured around his various runs, mostly with his dogs, one of which was a wolf called Brenin, hence the title, it is really a meditation on the nature of work and play and on the intrinsic value of things. For me it led neatly on from the last book I’d finished on my Kindle – ‘How much is enough?’ by Lord Skidelsky and his son – which discusses many of the same issues.
What is work? Work is instrumental – that is, you do it for something else. So you do a job for the money, you may go running for your health, or to prolong your life, or to win prizes. By that definition, anything in life that you do not do for its own sake, is work. A man and a woman making love are not working. A prostitute of whatever gender almost certainly is – it’s not the act itself, but the money earned that is their motive. When you start to think about this, you realise how much of life is in fact a kind of work. That it consists in doing something for the sake of something else.
Despite my recent woes, I am quite lucky, because actually an enormous amount of my life has tended to be play. My work in computers I would often (and did) happily do for nothing. I have been for the most part physically fit and have hugely enjoyed swimming, gliding, skiing, cycling.
So I have mostly been a player, rather than a worker. But this is not to say these things have been easy or fun. Often they all involve extremely hard work, stress, disappointment, even pain (like long distance running, for example) – but I haven’t done them for any other reason than the sheer joy of doing them. I did try and get a few gliding certificates, but that was only because you’re sort of expected to and it’s more fun to have a challenge, but really all I was interested in was floating around in the sky over East Anglia for hours and doing aerobatics.
What about love, family, friends? At their best, these are all “play”. We love people for their own sake – our children, our partners, our friends. To that extent all these relationships are the purest play (which is a good definition of selfless love or agape, and perhaps why the Hindus talk of God’s play or lila).
So why did my life fall off a cliff, if I am such an accomplished player? Because pretty much everything over the course of the last few years became progressively less and less play, and more and more work, as in a means to an end – my job, my marriage and, and this is the point of this article, meditation.
Meditation became for me not an end in itself, a thing to do entirely for its own sake, but a way of coping with all the other things that were going wrong in my life, of escaping from them, of making myself calm down, and also of providing the escape route – that I will become a better, kinder, more capable, more loving person, because I am meditating regularly. Even perhaps become enlightened, one with God, go to heaven (which would obviously solve all my problems!). So meditation itself became work, and possibly, as a result, actually harmful. Because it allowed me to avoid the present and the reality of me, now. I don’t have infinite patience or love, or the ability to take on other people’s burdens, without breaking down. As Laurence Freeman has said a lot recently – the virus of perfectionism had got me, but I couldn’t see it. I should have talked to someone a long time ago and they might have been able to show it to me (what I was doing to myself and those around me, especially my wife).
This has ended up being rather more about me than I intended, but please take it as a loving warning - don’t let your life become work and, especially, don’t let your meditation become work.
David Simpson

Married life

In my shed. Listening to the Westminster Hour on R4, with half an ear. Bedding on the floor, water by my side, precious things in the suitcase, ready for a runner.

Options - stick it out, it'll blow over, we've been here before.

Run away, slowly. Give everything that's left to Pol, think of a place to go, leave, on foot, with my world on my back.

Find a room in Coggeshall, and live there. Arggh! I'll have to get my own broadband.

Kill myself. I wouldn't mind, I don't think. Children and some friends might.

Actually I'd rather not. I'm quite excited about Top Truck Storage, Top Cars, even Top Trucks Transport. I'd like to see if they work out.

Surrender. Go to AA meetings, stop drinking, beg, be really good, hope that does the trick. But in my heart of hearts, I'm not sure she gives a fuck, she'd just like to see me out of here . . . or I'd just like to be out of here.

I think I'll watch the Promise Pt 2 and go to bed.

Watch this space . . .

modern technology

Talking to P last night about what's wrong with modern technology (mobiles, internet, social networking etc. etc.) - today there are many fewer random interactions.

Before the mid 19th Century (in this country anyway) most people had no interactions with anyone outside their family and immediate community. Then the railways, the bicycle, the telegraph, mass circulation daily newspapers, wireless, telephones began to create a global industrial society, and people began to have many more random interactions - chance encounters with strangers on trains and in big cities, crossed lines on telephones (when was the last time that happened to you?) - random books on returned library shelves. People talked about synchronicity, or just co-incidence, about the 6 degrees of separation - a completely random set of links that would join you to anyone else on the planet in 6 jumps or less.