Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) (15 page)

To be self
less
, while being mind
ful
, seems to be a good solution, when the self intensifies and causes us to suffer.

Being good feels good because it makes us remember
that we are not the only person that matters in this world. We all matter because we are all alive. And so kindness is an active way in which we can see and feel the bigger picture. We are ultimately all the same thing. We are life. We are consciousness. And so by feeling part of humanity, rather than an isolated unit, we feel better. We might physically perish, like a cell in a body might perish, but the body of life continues. And so, in the sense that life is a shared experience, we continue.

Self-help

How to stop time: kiss.

How to travel in time: read.

How to escape time: music.

How to feel time: write.

How to release time: breathe.

Thoughts on time

TIME TROUBLES US.

It is because of time that we grow old, and because of time we die. These are worrying things. As Aristotle put it, ‘time crumbles things’. And we are scared of our own crumbling, and the crumbling of others.

We feel an urgency to get on because time is short. To ‘just do it’, as Nike said. But is
doing
the answer? Or does doing actually speed up time? Wouldn’t it be better just to
be
, even if less sporty footwear ends up being sold?

Time does go at different speeds. As I’ve said, the few months in 1999 and 2000 when I was deeply ill felt like years. Decades, even. Pain lengthens time. But that is only because pain forces us to be aware of it.

Being aware of other things also helps lengthen time. This is all meditation is. Awareness of ourselves in the ‘amber’ of the moment, to use Kurt Vonnegut’s term. It sounds easy, but how much of our lives are we actually
living in the present? How much instead are we either excited or worrying about the future, or regretting or mourning the past? Our response to all this worry about time is to try and achieve things before it is too late. Gain money, improve our status, marry, have children, get a promotion, gain more money, on and on for ever. Or rather, not for ever. If it were for ever, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But we kind of know that turning life into a desperate race for more stuff is only going to shorten it. Not in years, not in terms of actual time, but in terms of how time feels. Imagine all the time we had was bottled up, like wine, and handed over to us. How would we make that bottle last? By sipping slowly, appreciating the taste, or by gulping?

Formentera

TO THE SOUTH
of Ibiza there is the small island of Formentera, fourth-largest of the Balearic Islands. Me and Andrea used to go there sometimes on rare days off. It was a place of white beaches and pristine water – the cleanest in the whole Mediterranean due to UNESCO-protected seagrasses under the water. It was the calming yin to Ibiza’s frenetic yang. Its small population of two thousand people is dotted liberally with artists, hippies and yoga instructors (if you look at it on the map you’ll see it is shaped like an upside down V, as if the island is continually in downward dog pose). It retained a sixties vibe. Bob Dylan spent some time living in the lighthouse at Cap de Barbaria, on the island’s southernmost tip. Formentera was also where Joni Mitchell wrote the album
Blue
.

I used to have a phobia about the Balearics. Couldn’t face the idea of them, as it was on Ibiza that I began to
fall apart. But now when I think of a calm place, I think of here. I picture its landscape of juniper and almond trees. I think of that sea as well. So bright and blue and clear.

I think of the names of its small villages, and harbour, and beaches. Es Pujol, El Pilar de la Mola, La Savina, Cap de Barbaria, Playa Illetes. And, most evocative of all, the name of the island itself.

When I feel the tension rising I sometimes close my eyes and think of it, the word rolling like soft pristine saltwater against sand.
Formentera, Formentera, Formentera
. . .

Images on a screen

IN THE OLD
days, before the breakdown, I used to deal with worry by distracting myself. By going out to clubs, by drinking heavily, by spending summers in Ibiza, by wanting the spiciest food, the brashest movies, the edgiest novels, the loudest music, the latest nights. I was scared of the quiet. I was scared, I suppose, of having to slow down and soften the volume. Scared of having nothing but my own mind to listen to.

But after I became ill, all of this was suddenly out of bounds. I once switched on the radio and heard pounding house music and it gave me a panic attack. If I ate a jalfrezi, I would lie in bed that night hallucinating and palpitating. People talk about using alcohol and drugs to self-medicate, and I would have loved to dull my senses. I would have taken crack if I thought it would help me ignore the hurricane in my head. But from the age of twenty-four to thirty-two I didn’t have so much as a single
glass of wine. Not because I was strong (as my teetotal future mother-in-law always thought I was) but because I was petrified of anything that would alter my mind. I went five of those years refusing even to take an ibuprofen. Not because I had been drunk off my head when I first became ill – the day I became ill I hadn’t had so much as a sip of alcohol and was in a (comparatively) healthy patch. I suppose it was just that feeling that my damaged mind lay precariously in the balance, like the bus hanging off the edge of a cliff in
The Italian Job
, and that the gold/alcohol might look tempting but to reach for it would be to send yourself falling towards a fatal end.

So, this was the problem. Just when I really needed to take my mind off something, I couldn’t. My fear was such that even after smelling a glass of Andrea’s red wine I would imagine those inhaled molecules entering my brain and tilting it further away from me.

But this was a good thing. It meant I had to focus on my mind. Like in an old horror movie, I was pulling back the curtain and seeing the monster.

Years later, I would read books on mindfulness and meditation, and realise that the key to happiness – or that even more desired thing,
calmness
– lies not in always
thinking happy thoughts. No. That is impossible. No mind on earth with any kind of intelligence could spend a lifetime enjoying only happy thoughts. The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them.

Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.

That is how we must be with our minds. We must allow ourselves to feel their gales and downpours, but all the time knowing this is just necessary weather.

When I sink deep, now, and I still do from time to time, I try and understand that there is another, bigger and stronger part of me that is not sinking. It stands unwavering. It is, I suppose, the part that would have been once called my soul.

We don’t have to call it that, if we think it has too many connotations. We can call it simply a self. Let’s just understand this. If we are tired or hungry or hungover, we are likely to be in a bad mood. That bad mood is therefore not really us. To believe in the things we feel at that point
is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.

But when I was at my lowest points I touched something solid, something hard and strong at the core of me. Something imperishable, immune to the changeability of thought. The self that is not only I but also we. The self that connects me to you, and human to human. The hard, unbreakable force of survival. Of life. Of the 150,000 generations of us that have gone before, and of those yet to be born. Our human essence. Just as the ground below New York and, say, Lagos, becomes identical if you go down far enough beneath the earth’s surface, so every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core.

I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.

Smallness

I WENT BACK
to visit my parents in Newark about a month ago. They don’t live in the same house, but the street they are on is parallel to the street where we used to live. It is a five-minute walk.

The corner shop is still there. I walked there
on my own
and bought a newspaper and could happily wait for the shopkeeper to give me my change. The houses I passed were the same orange brick houses. Nothing much had changed. Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious. Yet nothing is more freeing. To accept your smallness in the world.

How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow)