doubts about the future of humanity. Human society, wrote White, reminded him of how sailors talk of the weather as ‘a great bluffer’: ‘Things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly... Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.’9
The break in the clouds may come to us as friend, or stranger. As unexpected event. Even unwelcome. J. R. R. Tolkien, who had seen darker days than most in the trenches of the First World War, refused to give up on hope. Perhaps this was at the back of his mind when he wrote a scene in The Lord of the Rings, as war approached in Middle Earth:
‘“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”’10
20
Trust your instinct
On the first day in a new job, or at a new school, your antennae go into overload. Particularly when it comes to the people with whom you’ll be sharing this habitat. Every receptor you have is on alert for signals. Is she snooty or just shy? Is he genuinely friendly, or over-compensating? Why does she do that thing with her hair? Does he always sit like that? Do I like her? Can I trust him?
‘It would be interesting,’ says the essayist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink, ‘to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.’1 No one single sense is involved in these perceptions: it’s all of them, at the same time. We get a reading off someone in an instant. Call it gut feeling, instinct, intuition, hunch.
These readings, which we receive from people, places or situations, aren’t logical constructions. They don’t come from reasoning; they tend to arrive as a hit. But that doesn’t mean we can’t trust them. Often our instinctive decryptions are a mash up of lived experience, emotion, body language and more.
Yes, sometimes our own bad past experiences can make us fearful, or defensive, and give us false readings. And other people’s insecurities can mean they jam their own signals. So, it’s not always wise to rush to judgement. Nonetheless, our instincts are pretty reliable. And in the normal round of life, work and relationships, we can’t give one another the kind of vetting necessary for joining the security services. The singer Bono puts it like this: ‘I’ve always believed in instinct over intellect. The instinct is what you always knew; intellect is what you figure out.’2
We take a leap of faith and, Gladwell says, ‘There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.’3
We need to be able to put our trust in our instincts and in each other, even if it’s provisional. The broadcaster Melvyn Bragg believes that faith and instinct are kissing cousins: ‘I think faith is the great undiscovered region of our minds. It’s like instinct, which I’ve always thought is compressed intelligence, at such a high speed you can’t see it, as fast as a blink.’4
Like instinct, he says, ‘faith is very often a whole perception which has to be (as it were) deconstructed into what is plausible and what is not’.5
We can lean on our instinct, faith – lay bets on it. We have to, otherwise we can’t make relationships. But we also need to interrogate it. Left unquestioned, instinct can become bigotry, phobia. But when our instincts warm us to people, to ideas, and ways of living, life unfurls. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.6
21
Tune in
George Herbert, the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, wrote a poem about prayer, ‘Prayer (I)’, without explaining what prayer was. Just as well. ‘Hands together, heads bowed, eyes closed’ doesn’t really do it.
But he hinted at what can happen when people try to pray. And his best hint was simply this: ‘something understood’.
Every now and again. For a second – or less – we luck out on an ‘aha!’ moment. Something understood... even if it remains something we can’t quite explain.
Most faiths involve prayer and while some, like Buddhism, don’t rely on a god, the emerging discipline of ‘mindfulness’ offers a way of ‘prayer’ that doesn’t rely on faith. Prayer is tuning in. Opening ourselves to hearing ‘the tune which all things hear’ as Herbert phrases it. It’s about joining a conversation with whatever or whoever may be within, behind or beyond it all. It’s about another way of being. Herbert calls it: ‘The soul in paraphrase.’1
You can kneel, sit in the lotus position, prostrate yourself, go for a stroll.
You can breathe, chant, mutter, shout, say nothing.
You can flatter, beg, reason, provide a shopping list, empty yourself.
You can use a prayer book, repeat a mantra, make it up as you go along, live it out.
You can address God, speak to the trees, petition the dead, talk to yourself.
You can pray deliberately or allow it to happen.
You can be by yourself, or with others.
‘It doesn’t matter how you pray,’ says novelist Anne Lamott: ‘With your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors... Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.’2
Prayer is not about cause and effect. Or at least not in any way that anyone has ever convincingly explained. Prayer is about changing ourselves, and so changing the world. There is only one rule in prayer: the rule of waiting. Ann Lewin, in her poem ‘Disclosure’3, says that it’s like waiting to catch sight of a kingfisher:
All you can do is
Be where he is likely to appear, and Wait.
And yet, she says, ‘Often, nothing much happens’:
There is space, silence and
Expectancy. No visible sign, only the
Knowledge that he’s been there
And may come again.
But sometimes, when you’ve almost stopped expecting anything,
...a flash of brightness
Gives encouragement.
22
Make a habit of it
