Creams and potions, designer labels, surgery, botox, collagen injections and harsh regimes of exercise and diet battle with the body’s steady decay.
And even here it is possible to spot a hideous paradox in the culture itself. You are expected to put self at the centre and worship self-advancement, yet at the same time you are endlessly bombarded with images of how you ought to look and how your lifestyle ought to be. The only conclusion you can draw is that somehow being ‘yourself’ isn’t good enough. It is impossible to switch on the television or open a magazine without seeing some youthful vision of sexually charged and highly toned humanity. With it comes the empty promise that this car, or that perfume, or this diet, or that surgical operation will deliver the body/salary/sexual fulfilment you crave. And none of it does. Or, to be more accurate, it delivers just enough to get you hooked.
We wear the T-shirt, but its insistence that I am the centre of the universe now appears rather desperate; for the inner truth is that we don’t feel this way at all. We pretend it is what we want, and we desire it with the same despairing hunger of any junkie, but in order to get it we now realize that what we really want is to be someone else. Our own pathetic imitation of humanity is too fat, too old, too ugly, too poor, too ordinary (too human, too frail). Actually, we hate ourselves. That is what believing yourself to be the centre has achieved. There is nothing at the centre except a self-loathing and a futile desperation to be someone else – someone rich, someone beautiful.
For this horrible malaise there is only one cure I know. It is to put something else at the centre. But how and where will we find such a thing?
For the time being let us put that to one side; the central message of this book is that stopping, and doing nothing very much in particular for a few hours, is a good thing to do, and that when you do it you very slowly start to rediscover yourself in relation to others and to the world itself. You value yourself but find your centre somewhere else. This does require a certain act of will: not just the stopping, but also the convincing that actually you are not the centre of everything; that other people really do exist; that they have the same feelings, anxieties, joys and heartbreaks that you do. It requires paying attention to others as well as yourself. And also resting for a little while; and even quietly observing other people and enjoying their presence without necessarily knowing who they are or having anything directly to do with them. This can be an enormous blessing. Try just sitting still in a crowded busy place and watching everyone around you going about their business and then fostering inside yourself a thankful spirit for the independence of all these people and your inter-dependence with them. They, with you, are all part of the vast and complex tapestry of human life and that itself is only a small, but brilliantly beautiful, part of a much grander scheme of immense loveliness.
And now we are halfway to another astonishing conclusion. This beautiful world of which we are a part spins on its axis and revolves around the sun without my help. The sun rose in the east this morning without my aid and will set in the west this evening whether I want it to or not. I do have an effect upon the world. Indeed, if we are to take an active interest in human flourishing and in the safeguarding of the delicate harmony of our planet, then little individual initiatives to save water, conserve energy, love our neighbour, will be of equal value as international treaties. It’s just that in the very grand scheme of things people can best understand and appreciate their own position when they place themselves off-centre – having an influence, but also being influenced; acting and being acted upon: part of something bigger than themselves; part of something of which they are intricately and preciously a part, but which does not have them at the centre. In other words – and to be precise – it requires an eccentric approach to life. For to be eccentric means, literally, to have your centre somewhere else.
In common parlance the eccentric is thought to be somewhat odd. This, too, is a fine thing to be; for if being sensible requires the slavish cycle of self-worship and self-loathing that we described, then being odd might be the best path to happiness.
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THE EVEN TRICKIER BUSINESS OF KNOWING WHO YOU ARE |
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
So if you are not the centre of the universe, what is? Well, the best advice I can offer is the same as in the first chapter: stop . . . breathe deeply . . . if it helps, imagine yourself stranded for a few hours in Dublin airport. Search deep inside yourself for those memories and feelings that are most precious. These are the things that can begin to put you back in touch with yourself and lead to your true centre.
Now I know that not everyone will have these particular memories, but can you remember the nervous passions and the trembling delight of first love when the sound of your beloved’s voice, or the touch of their hand, could conjure joy, and when just seeing them and being seen was rapture, and when the memory of presence or the expectation of encounter set your pulse dancing? Or can you just remember the aching thirst of loving and desiring someone, even if that love was not returned?
Can you remember just being with someone who trusted you and believed in you and with whom you felt safe? It might be a lover or it might be a friend.
Or can you remember how it felt holding your first child in your hands for the first time? Or else watching your children as they sleep, running your fingers through their hair, wishing that time could stand still, wanting to hold this moment, and so many moments, for ever, into an eternity: thinking, who will be there to love them and hold them and stroke their foreheads on the last day of their life? Or, for that matter, seeing someone else’s child; wondering at the exquisite mystery that you are here at all and that this particular new life began with that particular sperm and that particular egg and has now issued forth in this particular bundle of life? You don’t have to be a parent to be amazed at the profligate beauty of a new human being. And all the scientific knowledge of how it came about won’t take away the wonder, so that eminent gynaecologist and teenage mother alike call it a miracle.
Can you reach back into your own childhood? Can you remember what it felt like to be held tightly by arms and hands much bigger than your own? Have you known, and can you recall, what it is like to be cherished and valued just because you are?
But what if you have felt none of these things? What if you are reading these words and seething with anger and regret that for you childhood and love, friendship and parenthood, have brought as much frustration as delight? Or, worse, they have brought you neglect and abuse. Yet even the most neglected and the most appallingly abused carry within them the possibility of being loved and of loving in return. Indeed, this is what they long for. It is only this giving and receiving of love that offers them any hope. And the majority of people will have memories that they can return to, that define who they are and shape their lives; cherished moments when they knew themselves to be precious, moments that make life worth living, and cause them to rage against the inevitability of death. These moments are deeply physical – we tend to locate them in the stomach as much as the heart – but they are also what many people will call ‘spiritual’. They seem to occupy a place in our consciousness where we are most truly ourselves (so much so that it floods our whole being). It is impossible to imagine what it is like for this not to be. And even when a broken and abused life has given us a meagre ration, these experiences are the ones we wish to build our lives upon, places within where love and passion, tenderness and delight inform and sustain us.
Although the world has many explanations for these feelings, the latest being offered by the decoding of the human gene, there is still a great resistance to being so unravelled. And this resistance is more than
