Do Nothing to Change Your Life. Stephen Cottrell

Rather, I want to celebrate what happens when we dare to stop and reconnect with a hiddenness inside ourselves where rest and play issue forth in all sorts of wild, unexpected and creative ways.

      I am someone who has always found that writing poems helps me to make sense of myself and of the world of which I am a part. Therefore I believe I am a better person, or, rather, more the person I am meant to be, and better able to give and receive from others, when I write poems. But as this bit of me is lost and obscured by so much else that goes on in my life, when I don’t write poems I am therefore less the person I am meant to be. This not only impinges upon my well-being but on the well-being of those around me, and ultimately on the well-being of everything. And the process of writing the poem in the airport lounge (whether the poem itself was any good or not) put me back in touch with this essential part of me, and therefore lifted my spirit and the spirits of those around me. So here I am, a year later, remembering those happy hours in Dublin airport. And the reason I remember them so well is not only because what I experienced there was so real, so essential, but because it doesn’t happen very often. My return to Heathrow was a return to the frantic treadmill of deadlines and demands.

      Lest you think this book has parted company with reality before it has hardly begun, of course I realize that for the most part this is how our lives must be. We have our responsibilities and we must accept the demands they bring. It’s just that the small boy who, when he should have been paying attention during maths class, was actually staring out of the window and dreaming, is still alive in me. And he wants to come out to play.

      Here is the first of several gobsmackingly obvious and rarely examined conclusions that will be grappled with in this book: I have found that most of the really significant things I have learnt or thought or encountered in life have come from the well of this dreaming. And I am troubled for myself and for our world when every waking hour is filled with activity that sweeps dreams away and has no room for rest and play.

      A recent survey announced the grim statistic that as well as working longer hours than they used to 30 years ago, people sleep, on average, two hours less per night. All the gizmos and gadgets that were supposed to have saved us time have only succeeded in raising expectations about how quickly people should respond and about how much more they should pack into each day. Whereas if you stop, and if you rest, and if you dream, all sorts of other things come to mind.

THE ABSOLUTE NECESSITY OF BECOMING ECCENTRIC

      You’re only given a little spark of madness.

      You mustn’t lose it.

      Robin Williams

      So let me tell you about what happened the other day. I was shopping in town, probably being efficient and busy and rushing from one shop to another to get the things I needed, squeezing the shopping in between the other busy things I do, and taking no time to idle or gaze, when I passed a girl wearing a T-shirt on which was emblazoned the words: ‘Galileo was wrong. I am the centre of the Universe!’

      This pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks (a sermon illustration I thought!). Of course I’m sure the girl herself was enjoying the irony of the text, but at the same time its breathtaking conceit provides a penetrating insight into the human condition and the particular vanities of our present culture: a window on our self-centredness, for we do indeed imagine ourselves to be the centre.

      We may have dispensed with God. We don’t need that pathetic prop anymore. We may have stopped believing that politics can deliver progress, but we still crave something. Making sense of life, understanding cause and effect, asking the big questions of what life is about and why we are here, these things seem to be hot-wired into us. But now that all the big promises have fizzled out there is nothing left to do but reset the compass of the universe to self. I am the brightest star in the galaxy. And everything else revolves around me in dependent and adoring orbit.

      Human beings have always been rather prone to thinking like this, but in our present situation it is more beguiling than ever. It’s not that we no longer need or want other people (in fact we need and want them more than ever, for they provide the affirmation we crave), it’s just that they don’t exist in their own right as equal players in a drama whose centre is elsewhere, but as satellites upon which we can shine. The narrative that now makes sense of life, and around which other things revolve, is your life. Anything that happened before is of little value (for it was only a prelude to the real story which begins in us). Anything afterwards? Well, we don’t think about this one, for the end of our life is truly the end of everything.

      In order to bolster this conceit it becomes ever more necessary to disconnect with anything that might put us back in touch with the essential, independent ‘otherness’ of other things or other people. So you only care for other people in so far as these are people whose lives affect you, meaning that they are the ones upon whom you can shine, and from whom you can get what you need. And you stop caring about people whose lives are not in touch with your own, as if they don’t exist at all. All the problems of the world, from teenage pregnancies to melting ice caps, AIDS, animal testing, third world debt, fair trade, race hatred and religious intolerance, are entirely inconsequential because they don’t affect you. Hence there is little interest in the wider issues of justice and peace unless they directly impinge on our lives. ‘I am not pregnant. The water levels are not rising in my town. I don’t have AIDS. No one has ever harassed me because of my race or colour. No one has ever experimented on my pet cat, so why worry?’ This is the attitude of self-love that we learn early.

      Occasionally, one of these issues will affect us and we will set about changing the world on this one thing with a passionate intensity. But we fail to make the connection with all the other things that hold back the flourishing of the world. Politics, we say, like religion, has only caused the world’s problems and can’t solve anything.

      But even as we say this, the foundation of our world view slips a bit. In order to keep ourselves at the centre, and in order to stave off the end of the universe (which is, of course, the end of our lives), much must be done to foster inner peace and outward beauty. And from the smorgasbord of New Age spiritualities, philosophies and self-help strategies a perfect creed of tranquil self-delusion is constructed, where crystals, herbs, incantations and a large dose of positive thinking dull the pain of impending self-demise. 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