Beneath them, the day’s first çay (tea) is poured, a couple drunkenly kiss and stumbled backwards, two greyed men rip apart bread to share, and a distorted overalled shadow — a cigarette hanging limp from his lower lip — grabs two bright blue bin-bags and hauls them into the back of his truck along with the quiet crunch of breaking glass. The sounds of the gulls echoed between us — strange early-morning figures, ignoring each other as if ghosts.

And now I’m in a cafe called Kuff. Now, in this quiet moment, one hundred yards away I can just about see the rusted metal door of the apartment block Monty (my bro) and I lived in when we first moved to Istanbul. To save money, we shared a bed, we sat on the terrace watching the sunsets with no clue about tomorrow, let alone 2026 (it was 2020). And now — in this stillness — I notice the cats sit on the windowsills, and on the pavement; on the backs of mopeds and on the car bonnets. Here’s a young cat — white body, black head and white nose, watching the gulls as if haunted, lifting his paws, twitching his tail, micro-movements with his ears.

Five years! All a blur. And so much bloody heartache, too. Hope, and excitement, and joy, and so little tangible to show for it. Just as those gulls above me don’t leave a trace on the sky, nor did I in those five or so years.

Becoming an invisible person in a new country always gives me a transcendental sense of calm and presence. I feel like the stories I get wrapped-up in become transparent and fall from my shoulders. I’ve been quite busy setting-up my life back in London, and and in the midst of all the frantic re-construction work, I read a story about Guru Nanak that touched my heart:

Guru Nanak visits a frontier town, and the first house he sees is the largest, and most opulent. The roof is with covered with flags. This particular house is the home of a Money Lender, who, every time he fills another box of money, he hoists another flag above his roof to celebrate, and flaunt his wealth to the town.

Guru Nanak goes to the door of the house and asks for the owner, who, always available new business, promptly appears.

“Could you do me one favour?”, Guru Nanak asks the Money Lender, “could you look after this rusty old pin for me, and promise to return it to me when we meet again in the next life?”.

Anticipating that a good deed will increase his credit rating in heaven, the Money Lender replies radiantly, with a smile, “Of course, and I won’t charge you a penny for its safekeeping!”

Guru Nanak nods and departs.

Later that day, the Money Lender explains his recent deal to his wife, saying with pride that he will go to heaven for looking after Guru Nanak’s rusty pin:

“It’s just an old pin,” explains the Money Lender to his wife, “I’ll return it when I see him again in the next life…”

“You idiot! You fool! That’s a promise you can’t keep!”, his wife interrupts, “you can’t take even this rusty old pin with you to the next life!”.

And with that, the Money Lender got down on his knees and became a disciple of Guru Nanak.

And, when I heard that story, I nearly fell to my knees .

What a teaching! And how it reverberated into my soul. It’s as if I’ve been feeling a little more like the Money Lender: collecting… gathering… hoarding my little responsibilities in my little kingdom — raising one flag after another, causally in conversation, casually at work — and spending less time sitting in that empty space of unknowing.

But when travelling (as I am now), I intentionally let go. It’s one of the reasons I find moving from place-to-place-to-place so liberating: movement forces un-cluttering.

I left books with strangers, forgot t-shirts hanging on Sri Lankan washing lines, reduced the complexity of my life to, basically, that of a pilgrim.

In the last few months, however, new responsibilities have been swarming like a cloud of bees, and the complexity of my life has grown — so the simplicity which I had created has begun to unwind.

As a result, I have hardly been making time for watching the steam rising from the çay, or for enjoying the cats’ purr, or for walking for the sake of walking.

Writing brings me back to the ever-present moment. It captures it, but beyond that if forces us to really look at a feeling or a view. It forced me to watch those sea gulls and notice how they twist and play. Time to waste is never wasted time: it’s experienced, lived, breathed, savoured. It’s unproductive and futile by ordinary standards, and because of that it’s especially delicious. To me, it’s life-extending because an hour of nothing feels like eternity — and who doesn’t want to live for eternity.

So how to retain the simplicity of life? On reflection, I think it’s easy: it’s living out the lesson that Guru Nanak taught to the Money Lender. Every aspect of life, right down the the rusty pins, the mosquitos, the sunsets, the new moons and even Southern Rail, will be washed away — obliterated. And your whole life (and mine) will leave as much of a mark as the gulls leave as they cross that wide Istanbul sky.

Naturally, one can do all kinds of other things with life—make a dutuy of it, or a battleground, or a prison—but that doesn’t make it any prettier. Jut what life is, when it is beautiful and happy—it’s a game. — Leo in Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East

Murders, death in all it’s shapes, the capture and sacking of towns—all must be considered as so much stage-show, so many shiftings of scenes, the horror and outcry of a play. For here, too, in all the changing doom of life, it is not the true man, the inner soul, that grieves or laments, but mearly the phantasm of the man, the outer man, playing his part on the boards of the world. — Plotinus

I have been born many times, Arjuna, and many times hast thou been born. But I remember my past lives, and thou hast forgotten thine. — Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita

The white wooden bungalow was so ordinary that I missed it twice as I walked the street. A tree stooped over the roof, the porch, and the paved pathway — it’s dense shade hid the front door: number 44.

I stood in the road, arms crossed, looking up at the tree, thinking about whether this Regression Therapy was a good idea. I was once told that our past lives may be horrible nightmares. I might be a murderer or the son of a murderer, or actually murdered. I might be an unlucky victim a thousand lifetimes over, or worse a brutal perpetrator. If I was a devil, I’d be stuck with the knowledge that my karma is marked — so I’d be doomed next time around to suffer in lower realms of the Hungry Ghosts, or animals.

And with the image of a potential rupture in my sanity loitering loosely in my mind, I walked over the house where I’d been told I can visit my past lives.

As I approached, the tree appeared to shiver. Like catching somebody’s yawn, I also shivered. Was it colder in this north western suburb of Austin? — something here chilled me.

I stepped backwards, and once again, looked up at the tree stretching high into the sky, keeping the bungalow in an almost Norwegian-winter darkness.

The front door swung open, it creaked a little, and Barbara - my guide - appeared from the glowing interior. We hugged. She was tiny. I de-velcro’d my sandals (loudly in the silence of the house) and sat down on her therapists sofa, opposite Barbara’s wooden chair.

She explained she’d bought the chair quite recently from Ohio: it was made from an assortment of thin branches, glued or screwed together in a piggledy way. She’d hung some wind chimes to the back, and when she lent forward to brief me as to how important it was that I trust her, the chimes chimed. The jingling added to the mystical aura of the moment.

Barbara explained that I was safe, and that I was to trust her process. She asked me to pause the ‘rational’ left brain’s kicking and screaming at the absurdity to the experience.

Throughout the trip, I was invited to speak aloud about what I was seeing and feeling. She would record the whole thing. I was firmly told to stay open and receptive.

Barbara kicked a cable, and the bed I was to lay on began to vibrate. Its vibrations, she said, would help further deepen the trance I was heading into. I settled down, put on my eye mask and imagined myself (at Barbara’s direction) as a stone sinking, falling, drifting through deep water.

And off I went!

I landed at the bottom of the sea. Ah, so tranquil and still, with the ripples of the water going outwards as I settled deeper... deeper... longer... further...

She began: Imagine yourself in a garden, it’s the most beautiful garden you’ve ever been to.

Now wander through it. (I wandered. It was divine! Lavender and long grasses, a wild meadow, with olive trees scattered about.)

You arrive at a gate. (I arrived at a heavy stone gate.)

Pause. (I paused.)

Feel the gate. (I felt it, it was cold against my hands. Strange!)

Now, Hector, step through the gate: step through!

I hesitated, and then stepped beyond.

What do you find on the other side?

It was dark (must be night time?) and on the horizon the sun was rising. The ground was black like peat. I knelt down to feel the soil, but it was warm. I felt the earth between my fingers.

Was it peat?

No, burned soil. All cindered. I looked up at the horizon (this was all in first person), and the sunrise was actually a village aflame. My village. It was still the middle of the night. My feet were bare; I walked towards the houses. This was my home. I was in a gown or cloak type of thing. It might have been hundreds of years ago. The place was deserted. The house (yes, my house, I was becoming sure of it), was destroyed, the beams of the roof collapsed in; I climbed over them.

My family (I intuitively felt I had a family; wife and children) were not there. They hadn’t survived, but their bodies were also not here. I was felt a deep feeling of loss.

I began to cry as I navigated the ruined buildings.

This was all very strange, but I went with it. The left, rational, side of my brain was fussing; I ignored it. How much time had passed? a lifetime? an hour? a minute? eternity.

And before my left brain became agitated, Barbara suggested I jump forward to the next most significant moment of my life. She accompanied me the whole time, the chimes on her chair giving her movements away. Was she crying too? Her dog — a little ratty thing — scratched itself under the desk on the periphery of my consciousness. But Barbara and her dog were very distant compared to the visceral feelings of this cosmic experience of navigating what appeared to be my past lives.

Barbara prompted nothing beyond asking me what I see or how I feel, and suggesting I skip forward to the next significant moment.

At once I found myself in a field, with a woman I apparently loved, looking down into a gently valley with a river. I didn’t say anything, but the woman — dressed in blue robes — spoke at length (I couldn’t understand her). Barbara ushered me on and I experienced my death.

Now, my death was quite interesting. I later died of old age, and my friend, who I think was a priest, accompanied me. We held hands while I felt my grip loosen as my spirit left my body and floated up (“up, up, up” I murmured) towards the light, into a numinous space that sat outside of our dimension.

I recognised this space, funnily enough. I’d been here before, after high doses of psychedelics, where I had, owing to the dose, left my body and forgotten that I had ever had a body to begin with, and just hung out in the pure consciousness, in the ‘pre-manifestation’.

Up there (I say up as if it’s above us, but it permeates everything), I could communicate with the ‘Masters’ as Barbara introduced them to me. But just as I began to ask questions (I had a ton of questions, as you might imagine!), I could feel my rebirth, my manifestation; I was going through the forgetting process — my Self was being wiped clean — and I was a baby.

I was being born! To die, and to be reborn, all in an Austin suburb on a Wednesday morning, and sober too! This was a trip.

Now again a baby: out I came, into the light of the world, as fat little boy.

Birth was painless, yet surely a significant moment. This life, too, was pretty tragic, although I did later inherit land and power. My father was a murder, and I watched him kill somebody (when I was ~six) before he ran off. I know it sounds farfetched, but I’m simply reporting what I saw and felt.

In this life I felt emotionally shut off (I guess, this is what they call trauma). My mother was absent (dead, maybe? I never worked it out). I grew up cold and aloof, and I only found connection much later on (to my second wife, my first wife died). I skipped on into the tail-end of this wretched life, and found myself dying, and “up, up, up” towards the white light of the guides.

I looked about and found myself in the numinous space I had visited lifetimes (and minutes) before, among the Masters.

Now, I had an opportunity to ask some questions.

What’s the point of it all? I asked.

To Enjoy It! They answered in unison, in a deep, operatic, manner. Enjoy it!!!

Even the bad bits? This was not a very well put question; I mean, I was talking to god here.

“How can I enjoy the bad bits?”, I said.

Especially the bad bits!! (There was almost an orchestra of voices, it was operatic!)

And how do I do that? I followed..

Stay open. Stay open to everything that arrises.

After a little more back and forth with the opera, I returned to my physical body in this world.

I sat up, swung my legs over the side of the vibrating bed, and felt my face. It was wet with tears! But thank god it was my face alright, a little bearded, quite rough.

I had experience the losses and joys of lifetimes; I had chatted with the numinous un-manifested energy of of the before-and-after-life. And I had been sober through it all. I was led by the vibrating bed, the dog, the wind chimes, and gentle Barbara. Together we drifted from one lifetime to the next.

My ego jumped in — I must have been naturally good at skipping between past lives! Perhaps I was gifted? - no way (my Ego said) could everyone have had similar, dramatic and vivid, access to their past lives...

And yet Barbara assured me that more than nine out of ten of the people she guides have experiences exactly like mine: dropping into a deep trance and almost unprompted experiencing the profound significance of prior lives.

What the hell!

Barbara then pointed me to a drawing on the windowsill.

It was tiny, I hadn’t noticed it before. The drawing was a sketch by her young daughter, of a spirit or a Guide. There was a tiny speech bubble coming from a cloud-like creature.

I looked closer: “Enjoy it!” it read.

I was stunned.

It’s been six months since I took this regression therapy.

Barbara recorded the audio from the session but I have not had the courage to listen yet. It’s still raw right now. Two hours felt like two minutes. I fell easily into the liminal space, as if it was always right there for us to access. And in what felt like moments I fell right back out of it again, into the physical realm.

It sounds wacky, but it’s the trip I experienced. We live in a wacky world, and to fall from one past life into another, learning things along the way (how to be open, how to enjoy life as it presents itself). This is just one element of this otherworldly experience.

I left Barbara’s house shaken but otherwise renewed. Life is not heavy if we’re going to be back again and again.

Until now, I’ve always nodded agreeably with the Buddha’s teachings right up until reincarnation. At reincarnation I would pause for a moment, think ‘pah!” and say “that’s little far fetched”, and move on.

But now I have a more open mind. I felt the rough ground of some incinerated village beneath my bare feet. I watched death take me away into a place I half-recognised. I communed with the Masters! And they told me to enjoy life. What an altogether odd cosmic adventure.

Recently, I've been finding joy in appreciating the authenticity of those around me.

But often authenticity, when expressed, isn't quite what I want to hear. It's a No or a Later or a Never. Eugh. So when I'm being told as much, or worse, I reflect that I'm hearing the authentic expression of somebody in touch with their wants, with the space to express them. This framing sweetens the medicine.

Ever since primary school, we’ve been taught that in any situation, there is wrong and a right — good and evil — and that a disagreement, when it floats to the surface, points to somebody being incorrect (so, a little bit evil). When colliding in dispute, I feel threatened: "I am wrong". This is why conflict always sat very uncomfortably with me. After all, who wants to be bad, evil, wrong!?

However, a disagreement exposes two beautiful things:

First, it exposes the counter position from which I stand. People are mostly not wildly crazy — even though they may not corroborate what I'm saying! The counterfactual is usually grounded in reality. What reality? Ask! Their alternative perspective not the one that I'm blessed with (and vice versa). Therefore, any new disagreement exposes a whole magnificent counterfactual universe which I can explore.

Second, our disagreement exposes an authentic, non-people-pleasing dimension. I am gifted somebody's truth. This, when given space, is delicious to unpack.

This morning, I had a disagreement over strategy with my cofounder in a café with dark wood floors, wood-panelled walls, and old wooden chairs. In those clattery acoustics, I could feel the disagreement rising inside of me.

I would, in the past, have pushed back on my cofounder's "wrong" position. He was mistaken, god-damn-it!!! (Oh heck, or maybe I was wrong.) Well, I would have either kicked up a bit of a fuss or ignored the entire topic — my well-worn avoidant tendencies would eventually jettison the conversation.

But this time, I sat with the rush of feelings and gave the void between our positions space to blossom. We rummaged deeper, like clearing a blocked drain, looking for the foundations of each of our perspectives. I wanted to understand why he felt that way. He wanted to know why I was so firm with my pre-conceived arguments (I was convinced that I was, of course, completely correct).

Rather than 'agreeing to disagree' or trying to convince Selman, I decided to dig into the why behind the logic of both of our positions, and it turns out we were never far away.

And actually — shock — there were vast acres of common ground, a whole proverbial Mongolian plateau of things we agreed about. Our dramatic opposition was based on a basic misunderstanding of ourselves.

Unpacking this all now, I realise that a lot of my discontent in life stems from my internal disagreements and subsequent lack of investigation. I make a decision I regret, for example, and then shut down the argument rather than cooly looking into where that inner indecision appears from. I don’t stay open; I close down.

Two sides can be right — both usually are, to some extent. Progress, inner or outer, is from trying to understand the space between and not letting disagreements fester or explode.

In February, I read Tony Robbins's famous Awaken the Giant Within.

The premise of his aptly titled book is that there is a giant inside each of us, and it is asleep. Our job is to wake it up. Opening the first page of the book, I already felt the concept a little self-critical. It reminded me I needed fixing and this was a reminder I didn't particularly want. And even if Tony was not saying I'm broken, he's at least suggesting the best bit of me is comatose and needs a good prod.

After finishing the book I wrote a list of the goals I wanted to achieve in life. It was a long list. I shortened the list to those for 2025, so about eight items (still a lot). I then turned them into a visualisation and sat visualising them every morning. I would get up early, creep into the sitting room, and visualise abundant success.

Strangely, this activity did not make me happy at all.

Actually it stressed me out. It made me increasingly uncomfortable that I was a fucking long way away from these 'stretch goals'. And days would skip by — then weeks — and I'd not be any closer to summiting these bloody goals. By not achieving them, I was failing at them every day! By being so bold, these goals were mutually exclusive, too — impossible to achieve together. Still, this didn't stop me sitting on our comfy white linen sofa with a cup of tea and visualising aggressively every day until veins showed up on my forehead.

I was setting myself up to fail. I felt like a failure!

For some reason, I wanted so badly to manifest a different future that I had forgotten what magic had brought me to living with my beautiful partner in our beautiful flat in Geneva. (Hint: It wasn't goal setting.)

After some time, I showed some people closest to me these goals. They took a cursory glance and, almost with pity, said:

“Look, Hec, this doesn't sound very self-compassionate. Why don’t you put this list in the bin and go for a walk.”

Suddenly, in a mighty cosmic flash, the vapidity of these goals shone bright in my face. I realised that this was all very self-critical! I trashed the list. I burned it in a fire ceremony.

Because even after all of the joy of travel, I was only giving myself permission to be fulfilled if I achieved these fantasy goals. And only then, with achievements pinned to my wall, would I be happy. The list told me with absolute sincerity that I didn't deserve to be happy today: I had to wait for contentment (with a sub-3 hour marathon and a $1m bootstrapped business and on and on).

What a joke.

At the time, I listened to a short meditation, and the teacher pointed out that everything I had ever achieved was not with me in this moment. It was all a memory. Every ounce of hard work, every newsletter even, every qualification, business success, or even my cycle adventure was all in the past, as inaccessible as last night’s dream.

And, so this meditation went, impermanence will happen to all of my future goals, too!

Damn it.

Moreover, this list of goals (and my holding on to them) presumes I know what is best for myself. It is as if I have some omniscient powers to predict my own Eden and foretell the exact position of the Gates of Heaven.

Well, I don't have that gift. Nothing I have ever wanted to happen has happened as I had hoped.

And thank god for those disappointments!

Because if thinks had worked to plan, I would be living a different life. At one point, when I was 15 I wanted to join the army. I'm happy I didn't, I wouldn’t have fitted. At another time, I tried to build retirement homes in north Norfolk (when I was 24). I wouldn't be writing to you from Austin if that idea had materialised.

Moreover, I hardly need to note that I never asked for the Big Bang to explode our solar system into existence. I never manifested for a perfectly balanced atmosphere, plentiful water, the Thames Water system of unleaded pipes, the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, or the dinosaurs who died to become coal lumps that fed the electric heaters that baked the millions of Kellogg's Cornflakes I had for breakfast which grew me into an adult.

My day today depends so many wild happenings beyond my control, none of which were ever on my list of goals. (That would be SUUUCH A LONG LIST!) So, given this fact, it's kind of mad to think I should have a long list of future goals in the first place.

Life unfolds in odd and unpredictable ways.

We wouldn't want to know the future or predict its unfolding. It would be dull.

From the outside, it appears that people who are able to predict the future with greater accuracy than others have better lives. Certainly, if you can predict the stock market, you will beat the markets.

But what if we realised nobody can predict the future with extra-special accuracy?

Instead, I now think life rewards people with good systems (that exist in the present moment) rather than big goals (which are future-bound and inaccessible, and remind us of our delinquency). A goal might be to meet your life partner. A system would be to approach every interaction with an open curiosity so that it's obvious when the right person comes along. A goal might be to run an enormous business. A system would be to do something that is important and which you are good at today.

So, what to do? Well, it's simple when we think about it in terms of systems. We have to be with what is and trust that whatever happens is not really up to us at all. Things will unfold; that's basically all that can be said.

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute.

The good news is there is no ground.”

— Chogyam Trungpa

Note from me: As I, as it were, condense myself back into the Western world, I will continue to search and discover writings and teachings like those which have excited me for the couple of years. I will share these here, like I have done below, and would like — in time — to create a sort of library for these outlandish and paradoxical perspectives.

They are outrageous. Unusual! Their authors have too often been exorcised from society, degraded by the mainstream, called gurus or fanatics or cult-leaders or mystics or witches or worse. They are odd. And yet, when I read them, I think: there is something essentially true buried here! Something always fresh and on the surface, and yet hardly if ever noticed. These words point to the paradox of our life that, I think, gives us our pervasive dis-ease. They point at what we know intrinsically but scarcely ever admit: We spend life striving, yet simultaneously it seems entirely outside of our control, that our bodies appear to get older, and yet our awareness stays fresh and never ages, that there is an “I” but also, that there isn’t?! Strange!

I’ve found these writings create clarity a little for me. I discovered J Krishnamurti in Patan, Kathmandu, in a beautiful bookshop in this untouched area of the city. His most popular book Freedom from the Known opened me right up and hooked me in. He raises the point: “All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society.” Maybe, for millennia, we’ve been very busy working on the wrong things! And this acknowledgment should temper our expectations for a world that’s far happier/better etc. after the technological revolution we’re experiencing. Maybe the story of humanity is that it’s one revolution after another, which never lead anywhere.

There was a long, narrow pool beside the river. Some fishermen must have dug it, and it is not connected with the river. The river is flowing steadily, deep and wide, but this pool is heavy with scum because it is not connected with the life of the river, and there are no fish in it. It is a stagnant pool, and the deep river, full of life and vitality, flows swiftly along.

Now, don’t you think human beings are like that? They dig a little pool for themselves away from the swift current of life, and in that little pool they stagnate, die; and this stagnation, this decay they call existence. That is, we all want a state of permanency; we want certain desires to last forever, we want pleasures to have no end. We dig a little hole and barricade ourselves in it with our families, with our ambitions, our cultures, our fears, our gods, our various forms of worship, and there we die, letting life go by – that life which is impermanent, constantly changing, which is so swift, which has such enormous depths, such extraordinary vitality and beauty.

Have you not noticed that if you sit quietly on the banks of the river you hear its song – the lapping of the water, the sound of the current going by? There is always a sense of movement, an extraordinary movement towards the wider and the deeper. But in the little pool there is no movement at all, its water is stagnant. And if you observe you will see that this is what most of us want: little stagnant pools of existence away from life. We say that our pool-existence is right, and we have invented a philosophy to justify it; we have developed social, political, economic and religious theories in support of it, and we don’t want to be disturbed because, you see, what we are after is a sense of permanency.

Do you know what it means to seek permanency? It means wanting the pleasurable to continue indefinitely and wanting that which is not pleasurable to end as quickly as possible. We want the name that we bear to be known and to continue through family through property. We want a sense of permanency in our relationships, in our activities, which means that we are seeking a lasting, continuous life in the stagnant pool; we don’t want any real changes there, so we have built a society which guarantees us the permanency of property, of name, of fame.

But you see, life is not like that at all; life is not permanent. Like the leaves that fall from a tree, all things are impermanent, nothing endures; there is always change and death. Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky, how beautiful it is? All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness there is a poem, there is a song. Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes it again fills the tree with the music of many leaves, which in due season fall and are blown away; and that is the way of life.

But we don’t want anything of that kind. We cling to our children, to our traditions, to our society, to our names and our little virtues, because we want permanency; and that is why we are afraid to die. We are afraid to lose the things we know. But life is not what we would like it to be; life is not permanent at all. Birds die, snow melts away, trees are cut down or destroyed by storms, and so on. But we want everything that gives us satisfaction to be permanent; we want our position, the authority we have over people, to endure. We refuse to accept life as it is in fact.

The fact is that life is like the river: endlessly moving on, ever seeking, exploring, pushing, overflowing its banks, penetrating every crevice with its water. But, you see, the mind won’t allow that to happen to itself. The mind sees that it is dangerous, risky to live in a state of impermanence, insecurity, so it builds a wall around itself: the wall of tradition, of organized religion, of political and social theories. Family, name, property, the little virtues that we have cultivated – these are all within the walls, away from life. Life is moving, impermanent, and it ceaselessly tries to penetrate, to break down these walls, behind which there is confusion and misery. The gods within the walls are all false gods, and their writings and philosophies have no meaning because life is beyond them.

Now, a mind that has no walls, that is not burdened with its own acquisitions, accumulations, with its own knowledge, a mind that lives timelessly, insecurely – to such a mind, life is an extraordinary thing. Such a mind is life itself, because life has no resting place. But most of us want a resting place; we want a little house, a name, a position, and we say these things are very important. We demand permanency and create a culture based on this demand, inventing gods which are not gods at all but merely a projection of our own desires.

A mind which is seeking permanency soon stagnates; like that pool along the river, it is soon full of corruption, decay. Only the mind which has no walls, no foothold, no barrier, no resting place, which is moving completely with life, timelessly pushing on, exploring, exploding – only such a mind can be happy, eternally new, because it is creative in itself.

Do you understand what I am talking about? You should, because all this is part of real education and, when you understand it, your whole life will be transformed, your relationship with the world, with your neighbour, with your wife or husband, will have a totally different meaning. Then you won’t try to fulfil yourself through anything, seeing that the pursuit of fulfilment only invites sorrow and misery. That is why you should ask your teachers about all this and discuss it among yourselves. If you understand it, you will have begun to understand the extraordinary truth of what life is, and in that understanding there is great beauty and love, the flowering of goodness. But the efforts of a mind that is seeking a pool of security, of permanency, can only lead to darkness and corruption. Once established in the pool, such a mind is afraid to venture out, to seek, to explore; but truth, God, reality or what you will, lies beyond the pool.

Do you know what religion is? It is not the chant, it is not in the performance of puja, or any other ritual, it is not in the worship of tin gods or stone images, it is not in the temples and churches, it is not in the reading of the Bible or the Gita, it is not in the repeating of a sacred name or in the following of some other superstition invented by men. None of this is religion,

Religion is the feeling of goodness that love which is like the river living moving everlastingly. In that state you will find there comes a moment when there is no longer any search at all; and this ending of search is the beginning of something totally different. The search for God, for truth, the feeling of being completely good – not the cultivation of goodness, of humility, but the seeking out of something beyond the inventions and tricks of the mind, which means having a feeling for that something, living in it, being it – that is true religion. But you can do that only when you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go out into the river of life. Then life has an astonishing way of taking care of you, because then there is no taking care on your part. Life carries you where it will because you are part of itself; then there is no problem of security, of what people say or don’t say, and that is the beauty of life.

J Krishnamurti, Think on These Things, and there’s a beautiful collection of his teachings on his Foundation’s website.

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for the future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “now I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.” — Alan Watts.

Down a steep gravel track, unsigned and apparently uninhabited, I found my guest house. It was somewhere in Sri Lanka, in the hills. The red-tiled bungalow with whitewashed walls had an adorable terrace scattered with woven twine chairs and a tea table. Through swinging double doors, there were bedrooms and a kitchen, with lines of ants crossing sometimes from ceiling to floor, sometimes from room to room.

There were just two other guests, a German couple, Amadeus and Ali — and no host to be found.

Being so deep within the forest, the house got dark early, and at dusk’s gloom, the three of us shared tea.

The conversation we had that evening shook me up, and changed my world view.

Amadeus was in his 70s when I met him. A decade earlier, however, on one breezy April morning, he woke up and his left arm was not working. It hung limp by his side.

Thinking he’d had a stroke, they rushed to the hospital. The hospital was not far away in the post-Soviet East German town where they lived. After comprehensive testing, he was diagnosed with a rare degenerative condition. The doctors explained gravely that slowly all his muscles would degenerate, and eventually he’d not be able to move, and then not eat, and then not breathe. This might all happen, they said, in a matter of months or, maximum, in a couple of years.

Amadeus and Ali were scared but in that moment resolved to live with an openness and calm intensity I’ve never otherwise seen.

To find a solution, they first turned to Western medicine.

All the very best European doctors said nothing would help their situation. He was diagnosed, they confirmed, the tests said so, they concurred, and that was that: condemned to live out the lab results.

Eventually, perhaps out of frustration, Amadeus and Ali visited a Chinese doctor. We can imagine an old and gloomy store, with walls lined with mysterious bottles that glint in the low light of the dark green desk lamp, under which the doctor sat rather hunched. Here, with a knowing smile, the doctor took Amadeus’s inactive arm, twisted it around a little, and — as if he had cast a spell — the arm returned to life! It was weaker than before (it hadn’t been used for months), but it worked!

The couple were thrilled.

Next, the Chinese doctor explained that Amadeus’s health wouldn’t deteriorate rapidly only (“only! … only! …” — the doctor added long pauses and repeated himself for emphasis) if Amadeus was very careful to complete a certain prescription of exercises: He was to swing his arms in a certain way twice a day, and then lift himself in and out of a chair, and so on.

Amadeus explained that these were all fine to do, but he loved dancing the tango. Could he just do more tango instead?, “you know, instead of these physio exercises?”

The Chinese doctor, pausing as if running an enormous mental calculation, said, “Do tango, tango like your life depends on it.”

So they did! And for a decade, Amadeus and Ali tango’d all over the world, competing, learning, even judging others. It’s now their passion, their calling! And Amadeus is strong and fit (age considering); although the condition had not altogether left him, he’s extremely robust.

Having gone through this experience, Amadeus carries a uniquely open perspective on the world. He receives every moment as if he’s being given an enormous gift, with a childlike wonder — it’s incredible to be close to. We went sightseeing together, visiting some temples and a school, and there was an extreme openness to their manner.

One evening in our guest house, sitting up late again sharing tea, Amadeus began to explain to me how he saw the world. I listened. He began,

“Hector, how did you feel five years ago, or a year ago?”

After a bit of probing, I explained that it didn’t feel any different to how I am right now, and the distance between me and those times seems vanishingly small, as if those past moments of ‘now’ had only just happened a second ago.

Amadeus continued (and I am paraphrasing, but the essence is accurate),

“Exactly! All of those moments of the past, they really happened in this one long ‘now’ that we are experiencing all at once, all the time.

“At some point, my left arm will stop working again, then my right, and then I’ll not be able to move, or swallow, and I’ll be older and I’ll die, and that will all be ‘Now’ too. Right now — exactly this moment! It will be fresh like this moment, expansive like this moment, simply ‘now’; right now!”

At his direction, we stood up to look at a photo hanging in the corridor: it was faded and perhaps a century old. The photo showed a busy road in Colombo. Many of the men in the photographs were walking with umbrellas. Amadeus said:

“Look at all these people, they all went to a shop to buy these umbrellas, they twizzled them around to make sure they looked good, they tested the mechanism, and all of that happened now, too. Right now! When else could it have happened? Surely not in the past — because that’s just an idea (we can’t access the past), and obviously not the future either, that’s somewhere else, impossible to reach, merely an idea; it must have happened now.”

I have since heard this insight explained in a different way.

Our experience is like standing in an aquarium, and watching through a small porthole window, a large whale swim by. First we see the nose and mouth of the whale, then a thick body with a fin, then a slim tail. The whale turns around, and swims back: first head, then body, then tail.

The idiot would reason that: ‘well, head is always followed by body, and body by tail, so therefore head causes body, and body causes tail.’

Now — of course the head doesn’t cause the tail! Absurd! It’s one fish. The whale is one happening, one arising.

Related to our own lives, we think that youth causes middle age, and middle age causes old age. Our life is just one thing. Birth is death. Middle age is youth is old age. Albert Einstein elaborated, explaining, "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Alan Watts expanded further, "The present moment is the only moment that exists, and it is eternity itself."

And Amadeus told me, under the moon hardly visible beyond the dense and loud Sri Lankan rainforest, “Now, now, now — it’s the only place we ever get to visit.”

There is neither creation, nor destruction,
Neither destiny, nor freewill.
Neither path nor achievement--
This is the final truth!

(Ramana Maharshi, from Nine Stray Verses, Collected Works, p. 138.)

We were in Macclesfield to meet James Low in a nondescript community hall near the station. James met us at the door, with long hair swept back into a tight grey ponytail, and big eyes like two glasses of water, bright, blue, and clear. I had heard him teach in the Waking Up app and remembered Dzogchen referenced often in my time in India, but I didn’t really know what it was all about.

In the week preceding the retreat, I had been feeling stressed and a little adrift; there is a kind of post-sabbatical shadow, an adjustment to the lower temperature of Europe, big questions to answer, the rekindling of friendships.

Reflection and countryside were exactly what I needed. The stormy weather cleared up. We were left with fresh, damp, dewy ground—a mossy green under gentle yellowing morning light. There is something of a museum about the Peak District: The now-smokeless chimneys of England’s dark Satanic mills dominate the quaint fielded landscape. These chimney stacks, peering over hedgerows, are the very first signs of a distant village. We would wander between them, following footpaths and canals, into the boujie coffee shops the cotton mills have now become.

When did the Peak District become so beautiful?! Well, we were relatively late: the hills around us had formed 350 million years ago, in the Carboniferous period, all submerged in some warm and shallow sea. Back then our Isles sat on the equator. Today, there is nothing equatorial about the Peaks: Hollinsclough, Lognor, and Buxton. Hardly tropical! —not a coconut, not a natural tan nor a palm between them. In time, the sea levels receded to what is now Liverpool, and the world’s very first land plants flourished in the swampy, coastal region that is now Bollington and Macclesfield. The titanic rise and fall of ice ages came and went, and those nascent plants were repeatedly covered in awesome ‘cyclothems’, crushed down into coal that enabled modernity.

Hundreds of millions of years later, our more recent ancestors in the Middle Ages discovered rich veins of coal and other metals, which we subsequently pillaged in the 18th and 19th centuries. Human beings, those soft-skinned mammals, were sent by their millions into cavernous long dark mines, only to blow-up or breathe in crippling black dust, all to enable ‘progress’. As early as 1696, it was written of the Peaks that they were ‘…Craggy hills Whose Bowells are full of mines of all kinds of black and white and veined marbles, and some have mines of copper, others tin and leaden mines, in which is a great deal of silver.’ (Celia Fiennes, Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary). The Industrial Revolution arose, and a network of canals and cotton mills were built (it was cheaper to bring the cotton to the Peaks than to carry the coal out of the area). Now the mines are sealed, and the coffee shops are open; how lucky we were!

I had turned my phone off for the weekend, and this allowed me to really hear the profundity of James Low’s simple teaching. I say simple because — as he said himself — there was not so much to say. The insight he pointed to again and again, with different anecdotes and stories, is in front of us in every moment; it’s impossible not to see when we stop looking elsewhere, and perhaps because it’s so obvious, it evades us. It’s too conspicuous!

We spend our lives seeking only to discover, this is it?

Eugh! It’s so simple, in fact, that it undermines the notion of a ‘path’ or a ‘journey’. There is this very clear sense — when glimpsed — of ‘ohhhhh, that’s what they’ve been pointing to all along’. I needn’t go into his teaching. However, I enjoyed how he pulled us in, like a whirlpool bringing us around and around, closer to the central insight. We were quite delicately — charmingly, even — convinced. He spoke extemporaneously for two hours on the first day and seven on the second, with those eyes, absolutely clear and present, unceasingly equanimous.

And after all this teaching, I left the hall knowing nothing more about James Low! In fact, James explained nothing about who he was and how he became a teacher; he hardly mentioned the word Dzogchen (translated as ‘Great Perfection’); he had written books and yet didn’t tell us he had, they were notably not for sale at the back of the hall. Nor did James suggest we follow him in any way! The two days cost just £30, so he wasn’t there to make money. His teachings are all free on his website. There was no: ‘these are the results you’ll see if you practice’, no: ‘it will improve your life’, no: ‘subscribe!" It was decidedly non-commercial. Odd.

Simply, he seemed to me to say ‘this is it’ — this is your life, take it or leave it. So if ‘this is it’, I reflected along the silent canals, surely we shouldn’t worry quite so much.

On my morning walks, I packed a couple of books in my backpack. I was followed by staring sheep through fields under oaks and along rows of elms. Sometimes I felt like reading some Tiziano Terzani, and at other times some Robert Service. Most often, I’d not read at all but just loaf about, appreciating how the morning mist settled in the low belly of the green valleys.

James pointed out that we know ourselves so little that we carry a book around all day with us, and then not feel like reading! It begs the question, how am I so unaware of how I will feel, that I don’t know if or what I will want to read, an hour from now? How should ‘I’ make big life decisions if I don’t know how I will feel in mere minutes, let alone tomorrow?!

This illustrated clearly the emptiness of the Self. We are looking for some kind of concrete certainty. I want to feel that I — carefully considering all options, and checking in with myself — am certain of a job, or a travel plan, or a home. Society begs for certainty! We want absolute conviction! And yet, I can’t be concretely sure of much at all, not even of what I want to read.

This all resonates with me because the last few weeks required many life decisions. Where to live and what to do. These questions are answerable only unsatisfactorily. I was puzzled as to why.

This weekend in the Peaks gave clarity: The implication of the Dzogchen insight is we can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, put too much weight on these decisions. We can’t expect absolute certainty. In the ultimate view, reality is perfect as is; we can't do anything to make it better. It can all be enjoyed as an immaculate flow of energy that we get to experience, a flow of life that comes at us, and we either fight it or go with it. There is nothing graspable, nothing to hold on to. Our holding on, wishing for conclusiveness, is holding us back (well, at least, it holds me back) because so long as we seek something solid, permanent, and substantive, we’ll remain quite disappointed.

Everything changes, ice ages arise and recede, Satanic mills are built and converted to sordid little cafes, the springtime fills up the hedgerows which thin out in the autumn. We’re here, embedded in life, a part of it, whether we choose to appreciate it or not.

I just walked out of Geneva's only Zen centre, and the sky is that pasty, washed-out grey. Later, the sky may turn blue, or — as happens every second day — the clouds from Lake Leman will linger, hovering along the cobbled city streets, enclosing us in that fresh Swiss grey. There is a crispness to the immaculate suburbs of Miremont and Plainpalais, and I saunter beside kids walking to school and professionals ambling to work. There's a noticeable lack of chaos; come to think of it, there is no chaos at all! No scooters cutting me up, no sky-trains overhead. I haven't seen a rat since I've been here. Strange!

My friends. We have tons to catch up on. I am no longer in Asia and haven't written (to my horror) for almost a month. It's been a busy month. I moved continents and began a new chapter.

After fifteen months of travelling, the stars aligned, advising it was time to press pause on my journey east.

This pause came at the perfect time. I have plenty of experiences to incubate from the trip. There is much to brood about. Getting to know new cultures is always confronting, and I recently got to know a few. To continue would have begun to overwhelm. In totality, I weaved for a few months through Europe, then a couple more through Egypt, Saudi Arabia,and Oman, and a full seven months up the Indian subcontinent, three in Nepal, and three in Thailand. Wow! Just writing that down makes my head spin. But to make the list longer would be excessive. Exorbitant, even! So, my bicycle will begin to collect dust until the next celestial realignment points me east.

Heck, I felt some resistance to stopping. My subconscious kicked out something wild: I was in samsara! (damn, I’d never left). One minute, it recognised the truth that 'there is no wrong way to live' and 'surrender to the unfolding', and yet the next, it screamed, "BACK ON THE BICYCLE HEC! Keep journeying, moving; don't stop or settle or confront." I felt insane! Well, which voice did I listen to? I've learned to trust my intuition in the last year. My intuition pointed me to look to the stars, and the stars said — without malice but with tremendous firmness — stop, follow your heart and your head.

Consequently, I sit and write in this adorable café in Geneva, happily tapping away to you.

Anyone who has taken a sabbatical or sat on a bicycle for a while will recognise the freedom that comes from the simple life of getting up in the morning, rolling around a bit, visiting coffee shops, walking into museums, trying some odd street food, getting confused with exchange rates (how many Nepali rupees for a Thai bhat? — we will never know). Or sitting with a book on a park bench watching the tapestry of the world thread itself.

A good chunk of this empty freedom dissipates when building up a life and a routine, although I've only been in Switzerland for a very beautiful twenty-three days. But, as we all know, freedom comes from within. As one friend of mine suggested just before I left Chiang Mai, our practice begins when we get off our meditation cushion. My cushion was more or less a Brooks saddle, a Kindle, and a pair of hiking boots.

It's now time to integrate some of these lessons from travelling, and I have three intentions. (I share them here because they might resonate with where you sit today.)

The first: remain spiritually connected. When traveling, I explored Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and non-duel teachings. When I peeked inside the proverbial spiritual box, what I saw interested me. The countless dharma talks of Tenzin Palmo and Alan Watts and Joko Beck and Ram Dass pulled me in. The experiences of Bodhi Zendo, Phuktal Monastery, Tiruvannamalai, Amma's Ashram, Kopan Monastery, and others lit me up. I intend to remain connected to these lessons. This is why I attended the Zen dojo this morning with its midnight-blue cushions and washed-white walls (we meditate facing them). However, the ceremony was in French, which eluded me. (So far, I can only order a croissant.)

Second, embrace raw simplicity. I adore the simple life. Aside from two new jumpers, I am living with the same kit I had on my bicycle (and am cold). Though my girlfriend tells me I needn’t wear trousers with holes in, I continue to maintain I'm overdressed. If I'm forced to, I'll die on the hill of simplicity, although there is the forever temptation to buy ski gear, or cycling kit, or hiking jackets, I will (try to) resist.

Third, keep writing as if I'm travelling. There is no intrinsic difference between the forested mountains of Himachal Pradesh and the wooded cops of Worcestershire (my home county). London and Geneva are two of the most beautiful cities in the world, and I will be spending plenty of time in both in the coming months. Most of the writing I have most enjoyed creating looks for the fascinating in the ordinary and the beautiful in the commonplace. I want to continue in this spirit, with absolute honesty with where I am and how I feel.

This is enough of an update for now, I think. But I'm excited to write to you more, I'm excited to be close to home, and thrilled to be beginning a new chapter of my life.

As always, I love to hear how you are, so just reply and say hello.

P.S. I'm writing a book about the trip. More soon.

Every morning we wake up and 480 minutes have skipped by.

It doesn't seem so much, but that seepage counts up. Can you feel them vanish? They sort of leak away. We've lost 4% of this year's minutes already. Gone! In 2024 over five hundred thousand minutes slip by.

The UK's average male lives to 80. I do not wish to brag (and it's a weird brag), but I have a high VO2 max according to my Garmin watch so GPT tells me I might live until 95. I am glad GPT is as optimistic as I am.

But let's be conservative when we run these numbers and say I survive to 90. (I was pretty cruel to my body at university and in London, so even this may be too much.) In the end we never know what’s around the corner, but ninety is a ripe old age; it's also a round number and easily divisible, so great for our calculations.

Ninety years is 47,335,428 minutes, and now that I'm thirty I have 31 million minutes left.

How we spend our minutes is how we spend our lives. I know it’s obvious, but I need to remind myself.

Should we spend our minutes in acts of service, sitting and meditating, on a bicycle, confronting various conditioning, making our beds, looking at ourselves in the mirror, taking selfies, shopping, eating, building SaaS, tweeting, writing, or maybe having hedonistic sex and eating chocolate and smoking dozens of cigarettes?

With 31 million life minutes left, I should feel wealthy. If I had 31 million of anything else, I'd feel rich.

And yet, I don't 'have' much of anything. In any second, we can only access our lonely minute—this vanishingly brief present moment.

My 31 million are as far away and inaccessible as the sixteen million I've carelessly spent. I wish I could regain some of those early teenage minutes, and those innocent childish seconds, and play among them again.

Worse: I missed so many! I was stroppy and bolshy; later I was drunk or high or thoughtless and ignorant. I was frequently angry and self-involved. I was rude and dishonest.

I overlooked my precious minutes, literally millions of them.

Writing, like all art, is a way of re-living an instant. I can go back and almost feel what it felt like to drink mint tea or stare at some hot orange sunset. And yet writing captures hardly the faintest essence of our inexplicable experience. The sky is a 'chemical blue'—I would have written lamely a dozen times—but does such a description justify the sky's distant numinosity? Scarcely. Even words like numinous and luminous and mysterious leave just a shallow footprint on whatever they attempt to describe.

I am sitting in a co-working space in Chiang Mai, looking dreamily out of the window at the branches of Rain Trees stretching up into the night. Behind them glows the moon, high and crisp and white against a black starless sky. I'm surrounded by people silently typing. To them, I'm another nameless, slouched, laptopped, digital nomad.

I’m mulling things over. I’m watching the clock snap. Minutes! Decades!

I think to myself: If I did nothing else but write to you every hour for the rest of my life, I'd publish another half a million blog posts—some 310 million words. I'd become an excellent writer, too. If I decided to sleep and eat as well (and do nothing else but write a stream of consciousness, six hundred words an hour, twelve hours a day, for sixty years), I'd do 150 million words. This is my upper limit.

The other nomads work diligently while I'm obsessively watching the minutes tick on as if they are rudely running away from me.

My minutes! Please don't go.

Amos Tversky famously wrote, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

And here I am, not wanting to waste even a minute.

I wonder, how can I live years without wasting hours?

Writing may be the answer to my dilemma. And art in any form, I dare say, may be the answer to yours.

PS. This was inspired by this excellent essay by Alexandra Franzen who explained why she doesn’t use social media. In the essay she explains the perspective of her future 100-year-old self:

I will calculate all of the minutes that I spent coming up with thousands upon thousands of tweets — thinking about those tweets, typing those tweets, editing those tweets, publishing those tweets, tracking to see who “liked” and “re-tweeted” my tweets, and then re-sharing my witticisms on various other platforms — and I would probably come to the grim conclusion that it was somewhere in the realm of 1.8 million minutes spent on Twitter, alone.

1.8 million minutes of my life.

1,250 days. About 3.4 years.

At that point, I will probably cry.

I will mourn my lost life-minutes, never to be recovered.

I will fantasize about all of the things I could have done with that time.

The kisses, the walks, the rich conversations, the sunbathing, the moongazing, the books, unwritten.

I will desperately want to claw my way back through time for a chance to do it over.

I will not be offered that chance.

So that is why I no longer use social media and why I probably won’t use it again.

At the end of November my Dad turned 64. I was lucky to be cycling with him from Bangkok to Chiang Mai—one thousand hot kilometres north.

As we peddled, I enjoyed being reminded of the villages and towns around Inkberrow, my childhood home: "This morning has gone on long enough," Dad said, "it feels like we've cycled to Stourport-on-Severn." It had been a slog, but we were not too far from our lunch stop: "Four miles? Only four? Well, that's to Evesham, as if we're heading to tennis on Sunday morning. I can do that." Another time, he'll note that our destination (among rice paddies) "is about as far as to Shell Ford"; he murmured another time, "This is going on and on and on! If we were at home, we'd be peddling past the Brazier's house about now". Sometimes, when we were close to our homestay, "not much further than The Bird In Hand" (one mile) or "as far as Droitwich? Hec, I'd rather get my teeth pulled out than have to visit Droitwich" (eight miles).

All this made me laugh as we weaved along. His reminiscing took me back to those quaint wooded English lanes lined with elm and oak. How romantic! However, we weren't cycling around Worcestershire but around national parks filled with Asian elephants and tigers. We weren't eating shepherd's pie but instead Pad Thai by the kilogram. We were hot! In late November, Thailand is warmer, flatter, and less grim than Worcestershire. We kept the mountainous Khlong Wang Chao National Park to our west and rode flat lushous plains. Green banana fronds and palm trees were rampant and hung limp above slim tarmac roads that weaved between rice paddies. The paddies glistened and shimmered in a blinding emerald green; we avoided the massive rocks, more monuments than hills, wich spring two hundred metres above us from the otherwise flat farmland as if dropped there. And with their pointed red roofs and gold spindly ornament, Buddhist monasteries adorn our route; we often see a distant gleaming white Buddha dominating some valley or silent cops. It's magical beyond expectations.

Thailand is the hottest I've been since South India. We dehydrated very fast but have found salvation. At every junction, in every village and town, there is a 7-Eleven (image of one, and once you’ve seen one you’ve seen all of them!). Two are often next to one another, both full of customers!

These little franchises are immaculate and air-conditioned. They serve a mean iced cappuccino with condensed milk, low-fat cola-flavoured ice creams, and miniature yoghurts with miniature spoons... I could go on for pages. After two dozen sticky kilometres, my ten minutes in the 7-Eleven freezer reinvigorated me.

We spent twenty days together, knitting and weaving our way from rice paddy to rice paddy, between corn fields and under a sun that sits too close to the top of our helmets. Dad's regular references to home—"This cafe is like Webbs of Wychbold!", a Worcestershire garden centre—remind me that we can't escape our context; nurture and nature have a tight grip. We buy flight tickets, take trains, cycle a lot, and change what we wear. And yet those apples can't escape the tree they fall from.

I reflected that we not only don't escape our parents, but we are more like our parents than we care to admit. Whether it's nurture or nature or karma, it's strong stuff. Often, I might nearly say something, and Dad reached the same phrase before me. I have the same ticks and mannerisms. I'd laugh at the same bad jokes. We have the same nose! All this, and I've not lived at home since I was twelve, so I must have been malleable before then; heavily conditioned up to my increasingly bushy eyebrows. Many of my friends, my dear readers, are having babies or have recently freshly minted babies, and they will end up like you! It's inevitable.

Birthdays always make me think. Sixty-four years old seems a long way off for me, many kilometres—many decades. It'll be here in a second, and I hope I can fish out this blog post and reflect on what my thirty-year-old felt in Cafe Amazon in Hat Siao on the tarmac heading to Chang Mai.

Perhaps the most precious moment, and most mundane, of the cycle with my Dad was sitting on the floor outside a 7-Eleven, on the warm concrete, eating cheese toasties, drinking an iced cappuccino and inhaling water so cold it made my spine freeze.

Scooties zipped, the traffic buzzed to and fro, the sun inched across the blank blue sky, and life stood still.

It—life, that is—almost exhaled.

There was nowhere to go and nothing to fix. The universe stood still, unstained and shining bright, in that nameless parking lot.

My shoulders relaxed, and the ice in my cappuccino cooled the palms of my hands.

I felt the ground beneath my feet.

Like a waterfall falling forever, or like the multitude of 7-Elevens we pass, or the turning of the bottom bracket of our bicycles, these moments fold into infinity. Therefore, there might as well only be one perfect moment in it all.

And at that moment, and the door beside us slid in and out and in and out, wafting cold air-conditioned air across us, I lolled back and remembered that sooner or later, I'll be sixty-four, and not long after that, I'll ride my last kilometre, visit my final 7-Eleven, and it'll be over.

All the busyness—all the panic of getting somewhere! All wasted! The panting and stress for nothing at all! Where have we been hurrying to? I don't have a good answer for that question, and I hope I never will.

Well, happy new year!

The energy is fresh, and for a moment—perhaps only for a fleeting morning—our minds are washed clean from the traumas of 2024. Everyone is on holiday and the roads are empty.

We undertake one collective world-exhale and then brace ourselves for January.

Today, the overnight train will drag me north back up to Chiang Mai, so I have the day to loaf about in Bangkok cafes, like this darling Midsummer Cafe in Nonthaburi, north BKK. I'm listening to Thai Pop (shortened to T-Pop, and it's a sort of meowing housey noise) on the speakers; the cafe has brilliant pink gingham table covers and yellow square tiles around the bar. It's very twee and looks over a motorway. The BTS skytrain skips overhead, plodding south like an enormous concrete slug. On the table next to me sits an adorable cardboard Christmas tree with sleeping cats hanging like baubles. Everything about this place is CUTE.

Other solo visitors are meticulous about avoiding eye contact with me and enjoying their coffee while doing photo-ops using phone stands so it appears as if the photo was taken by somebody else, even when alone. The camera height is calculated to perfection. It's dystopian to watch people having coffee with themselves while taking hundreds of pictures of themselves. Although they probably think my hunching over my laptop is dystopian as I tear my hair out, trying to find the perfect word. "I'm creating art! I'm a writer!" — and they believe the same, only it's a different type of art. Every ten minutes or so, a boy in an oversized bike helmet wanders in; it might always be the same boy from Grab or Bolt. He arrives with a gust of warm air and collects a couple of iced cappuccinos in plastic bags (cups, straws, everything is single-use plastic! Even those florescent plastic straws are wrapped in plastic). The next moment, he saunters off into the midday heat, "kha khaaa".

Thailand, and Bangkok in particular, is fantastic, as many of you already know. I didn't expect to visit the future, but it's very much the future! This time last year (ahhh, farewell 2024!!!) I was sitting in Riyadh, another megacity from the future.

Since then, I've eaten out almost every night. The amount of caffeine I've had is disgraceful. I've read a fair amount, I've meditated less than I would have liked, I've slept pretty well, all things considered (how many different beds!); only once have I been struck by food poisoning (Mumbai), only once feasted on by bedbugs (Thailand); I've cycled, hiked and laid on the beach. I have no tan. I've done enough yoga to touch my toes again, and not more. I spent a month in Oman, the same as in Sri Lanka, six months in India, almost three months in Nepal, and a couple of months in Thailand. That adds up to thirteen months, which is a long year, but give or take, it felt like one.

It was a good year, all things considered, and if my knees allowed me to do that again for the next seventy years, I surely would. It's been dramatic; it's been beautiful.

I suppose from it all I have learned one major thing: To trust my intuition.

This lesson was clarified when reading Moshé Feldenkrais, the Ukrainian-Israeli physicist who developed the Feldenkrais Method, which teaches that "thought, feeling, perception and movement are closely interrelated and influence each other." Now, he explains that thinking is not speaking: that is, thinking often cannot be verbalised.

Have you ever been angry, and your partner says, "Why are you angry?" You have the limpest answer: you sulk ", I don't know, I just am". Maybe you apologise, but the reasons for your disillusionment are unreachable to your somewhat thick 'rational' brain, almost as if another (non-verbal) brain is working away.

I have often been in that situation, lost for words and quite stuck. Am I especially dim and out of touch?

Well, Feldenkrais says it's challenging to express our thoughts because thinking is non-verbal, and hence most of it can never be expressed. Similarly, my most incredible moments of clarity arise when I'm cycling or running and firmly not 'thinking' in a traditional sense; I'm distracted, and — as if zapped by lightning — an insight lands inside me. Some thank the Muse for these enlightened moments (and this ‘Muse’ idea may be helpful), but instead, I think we do a lot of non-verbal thinking in our subconscious, which is hidden from us. We can sometimes tap into it; sometimes it's joyous energy, and at other times it arises as a miserable knot in our chest or as a headache, but the point is that thinking is not speaking; it can't all be verbalised and shouldn't be treated like it can be.

Our intuition is often shrieking at us, trying to explain something. I said above that I had been out for dinner a lot in the last year. I frequently go into a restaurant, and intuitively, I sense the vibe is all wrong. I leave. A couple of times, this happens after I have ordered. Why? I can't say, but I intuitively know something is wrong. Maybe there is no soap at the sink used by the kitchen staff, or I smell a rat, or a cockroach climbs over my shoe, and I don't consciously notice. It also occurs in hotels and people's homes I stay with. It may be a silly example of intuition, though it explains why my time in India was so dietarily safe, even though I ate in the cheapest places imaginable.

This line of reasoning has some meaningful implications:

Firstly, if something feels right, then trust that feeling. We all have things in our lives today that we could commit to because they seem inexpressibly 'right'. Why 'right'? You might not be able to say, and that's okay. Put logic in the bin! A friend of mine is flying to Columbia as I type against the wisdom of her parents, but intuitively, it feels like the right thing, so she must do it! If there is no reasonable explanation, then that's fine. It just can't be verbalised. Do it anyway.

Similarly, it's worth giving space and investigating if something feels intuitively wrong.

On the negative, it may require more intellectual hard work in order to fish out the reasons for the discontent, especially if it comes from some conditioning, or if it's work-related, it requires some writing (writing is helpful: I only understand what I intuitively felt about intuition now I'm writing to you about it).

So, if I'm intuiting anything that I can verbalise to you today, it's to go ahead and trust yourself. In 2025, trust the intuitive voice screaming away inside.

Even if you can't quite explain how you feel, the fact that you feel something is not a biological mistake; you've unknowingly thought deeply about it! You're probably on to something.

Have an amazing year.

Su su!

'Everywhere now human intellect is, ironically, beginning to ignore the fact that a person's genuine security lies not in his individual, solitary efforts, but in the common solidarity of the people. This terrible individualism absolutely must end, and men will understand at once that they have separated themselves from one another unnaturally.'

— Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I have spent the majority the last eighteen months alone, and whilst I've been travelling from place to place meeting new friends, I've been moving about by myself.

This has been the most prolonged period I will ever spend solo, unless I retreat to that Tesson-esq cabin beside Lake Baikal. This isolation, this living as an individual, has been a luxury. A rare thing. I have not once, or at least scarcely, been lonely. In reality, I have not often been alone, given the hospitality from people I don't know, and certainly not for weeks at a time. Travelling solo is very frequently time spent with strangers. Even so, I have surely become more isolated in attempting to 'experience life to the fullest' (to use Dostoyevsky's phrase) all by myself.

So, it’s time to reflect, would I like to spend the remainder of my life alone?

Categorically... no!

My retreat 'into my own burrow' has not been without its costs; I've missed my best friends getting married and having beautiful babies. My family is older (no offence), although my 91-year-old grandmother looks somewhat younger. And although I am undoubtedly more independent, I recognise what a pleasure it is to be interdependent! To be surrounded by the madness of a crowd of friends. To be integrated again! To not live like an isolated polar bear, padding from iceberg to iceberg, hermit-like, cut off from society.

I am, therefore, already (half-consciously) re-integrating myself back into my 'life' — that is, living among others! — and I’m beginning to think about what comes after I reach Japan; where to go? who with? how might I live? what shall I work on? Many open questions!

I have recognised, as Dostoyevsky did 150 years before, that neither our resilience nor individual strength comes from our independence but rather from our relationships with others. What is life if it isn't for relationships? For LOVE? There is a beautiful quote in Into The Wild, where McCandless writes from his beat-up bus, isolated and alone, that "Happiness is only real when shared." He is not entirely correct; happiness is real when enjoyed alone, but only for a short while. Then you want to talk about it and you want to post on Facebook. Sustained happiness is only possible in the company of others, those you can look in the eyes of and giggle with! Somebody to hug.

Indeed, I didn't recognise it for far too long. And it's those connected moments with friends, which are sometimes mundane but always priceless, that we carry with us when we go on our adventures alone. They are memories that warm us up when we feel all out in the wilderness, solitary and quite chilly. When Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov in 1879–80 (serialised), people were, by his standards, already isolated. It was the very beginning of the Age of the Individual. Today this Age is flourishing.

How much further we had to fall!

And how lonely can we still become?

In Nepal, in the twee villages we cycled through (around Kathmandu valley), there was a blazing sense of community: On one day, we pulled over at a roadside cafe for lunch, and a group of five weathered old men made space for us on the hard wooden benches. They each wore the traditional mountain cap with unique patterns. In the UK, men of that age might be trapped inside, sunk deep into their comfy on their sofa, kettle boiling, alone, slowly being lobotomised by BBC News. But in this Nepali village, they were out socialising; no screen to watch and no smartphone in sight. Presumably, they were exercising their minds with long, rambling conversations about god-knows-what (The Brothers Karamazov, I hope). Family was in the village, not far away. I feel the same community feeling in Thailand (I am now in Chiang Mai), and although I'm told it's changing, the kids still play outside.

We are left with the irony that if Dostoyevsky were writing today, despite all the apparent technological change, he'd write the same paragraphs as he did in 1879! As they say, nothing is new under the sun:

'Because in our age all men have split up into units, each retreating into his own burrow, each one separating himself from others; he hides, conceals what he possesses, and ends up alienating himself from people and alienating others. He accumulates wealth in isolation and thinks: I'm so strong now and so secure; but the fool doesn't realise that the more he acquires, the more he sinks into suicidal impotence.'

— Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I loved The Brothers Karamazov and highly recommend it. I picked up the Michael R. Katz translation in a book shop in Bangkok, which is easy to read. This month (December ‘24) Hector Hughes and I are reading Dante's Divine Comedy. Do join us! Here's a quote to whet your appetite:

"O human race, born to fly upward, wherefore at a little wind dost thou so fall?"

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. — Moby Dick by Herman Melville

So, tell me, what is your elusive whale? I'm curious. We are, of course, always seeking a whale to skewer and bring home. We want to show our friends and hang its twelve-foot jaw on our bathroom wall. I have harpooned this promotion! This BMW! This wife! This life! Now, give me my gold doubloon!—the very same doubloon Captain Ahab offered his crew as a reward for spotting the infamous white Sperm Whale on the horizon.

I loved Moby Dick and had fun reading it. It's an adventure, and the climax is worth the voyage; he captures the sense of listlessly floating in the Pacific, with a barren sea at every horizon, entertained only by the rocking of oil lamps and an albatross and the waves that curl like silver scrolls and the nests of rigging. I loved Melville's use of language, his humour, and his playfulness.

Herman Melville writes of expectations, unobtainable goals, and petty human preoccupations. Some believe he was referring only to god. This may be true, but I think he talks about all our arbitrary dreams, not only heaven. These dreams propel our lives along the watery phenomenal plain. Towards what?—toward our soggy grave, of course.

When turning the first page of this novel, it's very helpful and quite inspiring to identify which personal Leviathan we are fishing for: It might be well-defined or (more often) ill-defined, something spiritual or material, practical or mystical or theoretical, near or very far away.

Melville's whale is named Moby Dick; it's a colossal Sperm Whale with a wrinkled brow and a ghastly white complexion. In our own lives, it might be raising the next round of funding, closing a SaaS deal, getting a job, ditching a husband, selling a company, maybe securing an elusive promotion, finding a date, taking out a large loan on a large car, booking some holiday (Bermuda?), building a big house, getting our teeth whitened or a fancy hair implant, or maybe splurging on a jet. These are common whales for modern humans to hunt; each is a blubbery thing. My Leviathan is reaching Japan by bicycle. A mighty Pacific-bound mammal that one is! Not a small goldfish but a dreadnought, a Goliath that'll strain my lines: Some 3,000 kilometres long, it lolls leisurely from the Sea of Okhotsk to the East China Sea.

So these are our whales. We are each a harpoon-wielding whaler—exciting! How do we catch the whale? In every case, we have to leave our zone of comfort. We must sail the English Channel, quit home, learn the language, say hello in some sleazy bar, or ask—apply! beg!—for the new job. We must get far from home and bob at sea, scanning our horizon for storms and whale spouts, puffing on a pipe, muttering—aye, ahoy, etc.—about the alignment of the stars.

And yet, we often allow our whaling to dominate our lives. And we need to remember the cost of our mania. Captain Ahab said his wife became a widow the day she married him because he immediately took to the high seas. Can you imagine? He only spent three years in forty on land, not harpooning Sperm Whales or Humpbacks or Right Whales or Belugas. And on reading of Ahab's monomaniacal hunt for Moby Dick, I wondered how many times I have let my whaling adventure (be it working for others or working for myself or travelling; the whale transforms, she does!) impact my life. And, of course, whenever I'm proverbially whaling, it sucks in everything—you end up like Jonah sitting within some bloody whale; it gobbles us up.

Every new whaling trip invariably disrupts the order created in the wake of the previous. This is the great compromise of everything: we must say goodbye to say hello and sacrifice yesterday for today and be happy with it. Neither voyage is wrong; all whaling routes are correct. Even so, only one can be charted, so we have to decide. Tesson, as always, nails the urgent essential point: to keep moving after new whales and to stay enthusiastic. He writes: "The essential thing is to live one's life with a brave hand on the tiller, swinging boldly between contrasting worlds. Balancing between danger and pleasure, the frigid Russian winter and the warmth of a stove. Never settling, always oscillating from one to the other extremity on the spectrum of sensations."

This month (November ‘24) Hector Hughes and I are reading The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I’m reading the Michael R. Katz translation which looks great. Do join us! Here’s a quote to whet your appetite:

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

And here’s a final quote from Moby Dick:

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Being so full of rocks and very heavy, you'd suppose (owing to gravity) that the Himalayas would sink back into the sea.

You'd think so! But, in some vigorous rejection of entropy, the Himalayan range continues to climb one centimetre every year toward the dizzy heavens. Only 50 million years ago, the Indian subcontinent loitered somewhere south of today's Sri Lanka. And look at her now! For 50 million years, a mere blink in astronomical terms, India has hurried northward, plunging into the heart of the great Eurasian plate and squeezing away the (now drained) Tethys sea that stood between them. From this romantic tectonic crash, a thin ridge has sprung up some eight kilometres high—the monstrous Greater Himalayan Range! So uninviting as to be alluring. And we forget (because it was before our time) that our Herculean mountains were once little more than the quaint Chilton Hills or, just before that, the Malverns. Since then, silently and dilligenlty, they've been busy in their crushing and pushing upwards and churning towards the stars. From our limited perspective, the mountains look dead, horribly tranquil in eternal birth and death. But from another, longer perspective, they have been climbing up with divine force and are now at the very top of the Earth.

I was happy to visit them.

Being so big, so ghastly and impenetrable, the Himalayas are impossible to cycle over. Yet they remain beautiful and inviting because they are disinterested and infamously cruel. I could not refuse temptation. And so, my loyal and radiant green bicycle has hardly been touched for three months. Instead, I put on hiking boots and a bucket hat, and I headed by foot into the lowlands which are infested with primary forests. From there, like being born from pre-historic times, I wandered up tracks onto a different planet: A rockier and whiter planet that hovers above the Himalayan tree line.

I have met with both sides of the Himalayas. On the northern side, I visited Ladakh, which is very north of India and looked over Mustang in Nepal. These areas are shielded from the monsoons that rotate northwards from the Indian Ocean. This northern flank is red and dry and full of dust. It's dehydrated, thirsty, and fed only by intermittent glaciers, which quench the Ladakhis' extensive irrigation ditches so that patches of desert are luscious and full of food. Overwhelmingly, however, the northern slopes remain a blood-red desert, four thousand metres above the sea. This face carries independent energy: travelling from the south, from India or Nepal, to reach the northern slopes, the prodigious peaks have first to be crossed in 5,300 metre passes on roads that should not be called roads and are closed for many months of the year when the cold sets in. There is a certain aggressive nature to the choking dry dust that fills the valleys and only wets when a particularly large monsoon doesn't entirely exhaust on the southern slopes. The northern side has harsh militarised boundaries to defend against Chinese or Pakistani encroachment into north India. Thousands of military vehicles and smiling soldiers give the Martian landscape a post-global warming, apocalyptic feel. There is an isolated and brave nature to these plains that conjoin the great Tibetan plateau (Tibet floats monkishly between four and five kilometres above sea level, a tangle of mountains and uplands within which sits Lhasa). The north side does not say welcome nor go away; it simply exists in irreverence to the human visitors that trek upon it or drive about in military trucks. It'll all be quite the same after I've gone, and the mountain knows as much; they are not harangued by my boot prints, which blow away, or my gracious appreciation when sitting under the stars, eyes full of tears, in some hidden valley of Zanskar or Markha.

Let's turn to the southern side, which is entirely dissimilar: it carries dramatically softer energy. It's wetter; the monsoons crawl up the south slopes until late September, wringing themselves out over Dharamshala, Manali, Pokhara and Baglung. It's green and fertile, and the air is less frigid and more humid. It's sweatier. As we climb the southern slopes, Hinduism in south Nepal and India is replaced by Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhism up here is thousands of years old and remains undiluted by the 'development' of the rest of the world. Development? —who needs it! Certainly, there is no need for 5G or The Washington Post when eating Yak's cheese and drinking Butter Tea while contemplating peaks. There is compassionate air on the south-facing, sun-facing slopes. Around the next corner often flutters a string of coloured flags reading Om Mani Padme Hum, welcoming us towards those ghostly white heights that shine yellow at sunrise, always set against a cold chemical blue sky. I was invited to the mountains from the southern side, and from here, I first glimpsed the beauty of Makalu, Manaslu, and Annapurna and more. The southern slopes almost have open arms, and like singing sirens, they call out to tens of thousands of us, saying something like, "Check out the view from up here."

We don't hesitate, so there is no shortage of tourists! But the tracks over these considerable mountains are so tiny that the tourists (even the groups of fifty South Koreans) disappear to nothing under an eight thousand metre ridge.

I have discovered that it's a great relief to feel negligible. We spend our whole lives trying to become Very Important on a human scale. And then we visit the Himalayas. Her name comes from Sanskrit Himālaya, the abode of snow, from hima (frost) and ālaya (dwelling). We visit as if entering someone else's house, a frosty stranger's home, but that planetary-sized entity is eight kilometres tall (4,100 times taller than me), and in a footstep, I vanish. My bigness is replaced by being impossibly small. Why, I wonder, was I trying to be so important anyhow? What else is there to do but appreciate these cold, rocky outcrops? As de Mello says, "You are so proud of your intelligence; you are like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell." Why did I want my name in the prison newspaper anyhow? I began to wonder. We are very proud of our bondage! The transcendent mountains help us escape our chains because we realise we are small enough to slip from them.

And yet, as I climbed towards Annapurna basecamp in the biting pre-sunrise cold, I couldn't help but examine the stars above me. I was now so little that I had disappeared into the sky and walked among it. Don't we go to the mountains to visit the stars anyhow? Surely we do! Thousands of galaxies and suns were strung across the blue-black roof. There, I spotted the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, 25,000 light years away. Beyond it, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy seemed so close, but it sat 45,000 light years beyond Canis!

Is four kilometres significant against such a stellar distance? Yes! There were Dwarfs and Red Giants and all, easily within an arm's reach for the first time, each a million miles wide and so weightless I could scoop up handfuls and carry whole universes away in my pocket. On that breathless cosmic plateau, I was reminded of Jack Kerouac's quote: "Thinking of the stars night after night, I begin to realise 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realise that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it's all in my mind."

The Odyssey is a literary fossil; for that reason alone, it’s a delight. Homer wrote it some 2,750 years ago (roughly), and here I am reading it! How many sunsets and high tides and summer solstices have passed since then? Loads. Billions upon billions of birthdays, too — and dozens of civilisations. Homer was writing when there were still Pharos in Egypt, the Vedas were still in draft, and fewer than 100 million people lived on Earth (less than 1.5m in Greece). Men were 5ft 4in on average, and women two inches less.

It felt like a different world. There were no potatoes in Europe, of course. No penicillin. No Marmite. And to those Ancient Greeks, the planet was unimaginably more enormous — unexplored and dominated by gods. Indeed, the regular dots in the sky were considered gods (Mars was then Ares, Venus was Aphrodite) — what else could they be?

It was a time when god was the only explanation for anything and when gods interfered with everything. Homer makes this clear. Throughout his Odyssey, the god Minerva (aka Athena) manifests as Telemachus’s (the son of Ulysses) friend Mentor. Mentor provides sage advice, avoiding Telemachus a ton of drama. Even today, we describe those who impart wisdom as mentors! This idea of gods manifesting as people to teach us a lesson is, I think, liberating. If bad luck strikes, rather than praise or curse it, the Ancients’ approach would be to ask, ‘What are the gods trying to show me here?’ They would not, I think, blame the Mainstream Media or immigrants… but work with whatever the universe has provided — a refreshing perspective.

Aside from surrendering to the gods, in 2,700 years, humans then and now remain essentially the same. Tragically so! They fell in love and we fall in love (with Tinder); they told epic stories, we listen to The Archers and watch Game of Thrones; they glorified eating copious amounts of meat, and much of the world still does today; they exercised, we work out in Fitness First; they appreciated humour, beauty, and sarcasm much as we do. We are the same! And without language barriers, I bet we’d hardly notice the difference over dinner. The implication is that human evolution has, I’m afraid, stalled. You’d think we’d be more rounded, happier, and better understand the ‘Why’ behind our life — we’ve had nearly three millennia to iron the creases from it — but I don’t think our explanations today are much better than calling a planet ‘god’ and blaming all our misfortune on it. ‘Never surrender!’ could well be the motto of our time—and theirs would be the opposite. Have we gone backwards?

*

However, there is one dimension where we have made good progress: the moral dimension. You might remember some fervent violence in the Odyssey, especially at the end. This violence is glorified to such an extent that it feels ironic—but I don’t think Homer was being funny. Take, for example, the violence inflicted by Ulysses on his enemies as revenge for trying to marry his wife under the presumption that Ulysses is dead (he had, in fairness to the suitors, been missing for 20 years).

She [the maid] found Ulysses among the corpses bespattered with blood and filth like a lion that has just been devouring an ox, and his breast and both his cheeks are all bloody, so that he is a fearful sight; even so was Ulysses besmirched from head to foot with gore. When she saw all the corpses and such a quantity of blood, she was beginning to cry out for joy, for she saw that a great deed had been done;

And a little later:

…he made a ship's cable fast to one of the bearing-posts that supported the roof of the domed room, and secured it all around the building, at a good height, lest any of the women's feet should touch the ground; and as thrushes or doves beat against a net that has been set for them in a thicket just as they were getting to their nest, and a terrible fate awaits them, even so did the women have to put their heads in nooses one after the other and die most miserably. Their feet moved convulsively for a while, but not for very long.

Horrible! Ghastly! But this was acceptable, even respectable, back in the day. Today we wouldn’t be cheering, and I certainly wasn’t cheering for Ulysses when reading those chapters. Our standards have risen. What was morally acceptable even a three centuries ago is not today (witch hunting, slavery, the death penalty, etc). Our moral outlook is the most significant difference from the Ancients (aside from our height and incapacity to surrender to life’s mystery). And this, for me, is progress enough.

Might a book that survives three thousand years survive another three thousand? Incredible if so. And if it does, I wonder what our moral outlook will be then.

Ulysses and Telemachus kill Penelope's Suitors (1812)

This month (October) Hector Hughes and I are reading Moby Dick. Please join us! Read more about our book club and see the full list here.

It's now possible to buy an oat latte almost everywhere, and the world is worse because of it. Once richly-textured cultures are ever more grey, homogenous and familiar.

Even so, like nowhere else I have visited, India has escaped the ruin of Westernisation (or Americanisation, perhaps), and each state remains culturally beautiful and distinctive. Why? It might be that TikTok is banned or that Hinduism is impervious or that their culture is some 5,000 years old. The cresting waves of alternative milk macchiatos and woke culture and selfies splash up against some impenetrable harbour wall. India remains India; there is nowhere like it. Moreover, my God, the food is so damn good! And because every state is her own country (and each once a kingdom), adventure is culinary. This was especially true in Kerala, where the masala dosas and idly were insane. And especially when you get away from the ghastly touristy coastal towns, you ride among thousands of acres of flattish wetlands, following roads between flooded rice paddies with buffalo lying up to their haunches, with their wet noses shining in the evening sun.

I had not intended to go to Amma's Ashram. But the universe led me there, literally past the gates, so I booked a room among the three thousand devotees. Due to bad health, Amma, who is 70, travels less these days and was in. It turned out that Amma (The Mother in Malayalam, the local dialect and the only language she speaks publicly) was the most fully realised person I've ever met. Fully realised? A being who has come to realise the truth. Therefore, the meeting was powerful for me. Let me explain.

Perhaps a third of the devotees were Western, and everyone wore crisp white linens. Those not walking with purpose held prayer beads and repeated mantras under their breath. There were half a dozen large apartment buildings, and my basic room was cheap (it was summertime and too hot for most, so plenty were available).

I was immediately overwhelmed. As I walked around the ashram, which is incidentally in the village where Amma was born, I saw images of Amma (born Sudhamani Idamannel) everywhere: in the lifts, around people's necks, in front of potted plants, on bracelets. Her devotees, I reflected, were damn devoted. And I could not understand why. A cult! That must be it! After all, I am not used to seeing truly dedicated people. After leaving school, we infrequently go to church in the UK, only on Christmas Day or maybe Easter, but God is left squarely at the church gates and never discussed nor even alluded to elsewhere. We are spiritually impotent and only go to church when culture (or grandparents or marriage or death) forces us. God is forgotten. So, being around people with complete, unrestrained devotional practice was new, especially when it appeared to glorify a human being, not an icon or painting, all fleshy and bloody and physical, just like me!

Anyway, I didn't have anything white to wear, so I stuck out somewhat and wandered around the ashram, helping with some washing up here and some pizza making there. I spoke to devotees, some on their second visit, some visiting Amma for twenty-five years.

I learned that Amma was unusual from the start. She was born in '53 into a backward-caste fisherman's family and had six siblings. Her family was not wealthy, and one of her tasks was gathering food scraps to feed their goats and cows. In these walks, she was confronted with poverty and suffering. Despite being punished by her family, she would take from her home and give to the poor in her community. Since then, she has devoted her life to helping people. She hardly sleeps and works every hour she can to alleviate the suffering of others. Her philosophy is summarised in her own words:

"I don't see if it is a man or a woman. I don't see anyone different from my own self. A continuous stream of love flows from me to all of creation. This is my inborn nature. The duty of a doctor is to treat patients. In the same way, my duty is to console those who are suffering."

She sees us as individuals as parts of the same substance, slices of the same cake, perhaps. As such, Amma is a practitioner of Advaita Vedanta, which Swami Vivekananda explained:

Suppose there is a wave in the ocean. The wave is distinct from the ocean only in its form and name, and this form and this name cannot have any separate existence from the wave; they exist only with wave. The wave may subside but the same amount of water remains, even if the name and form that were on the wave vanish for ever. So this Maya is what makes the difference between me and you, between all animals and man, between gods and men.

Amma is most famous in the West for hugging people. Ultimately, because of Amma's grace, God's grace, or luck, I got two hugs from her, and the second one struck me powerfully. I had to sit down as if a bold of some mystical lighting had crashed into my nervous system and loitered for a while. I felt a divine connection, a clarity I had never before felt.

Thousands of people line up daily to receive a hug, then sit around watching others get hugged. It's a strange sight! A hug might last only a few seconds, but in that time, there is an opportunity to ask a question about life, and the stories I have heard about her answers (as I watched in the gloomy midnight light of the vast meditation hall) made my skin crawl with delight. How did she know?! What an insight! What vision! But it's not my place to relay the supernatural as it happened to others, so I'll keep sharing what happened to me.

Anyway, the Hugging Saint (Amma) explained the beginning of the Darshana she offers others:

“People used to come and tell [me] their troubles. They would cry and I would wipe their tears. When they fell weeping into my lap, I used to hug them. Then the next person too wanted it... And so the habit picked up."

However, her commitment to this approach is no weekend seminar; she has hugged over 33 million people.

*

I stayed for a few days and cycled north. Later that day, I cycled past a church and felt compelled to go in. Funnily enough, Saint Thomas, one of Jesus's disciples, arrived at the ancient seaport Muziris on the Kerala coast in AD 52. Because of this arrival, there are a large number of churches.

I never go into a church if I can help it. The last time I had been in a church would have been Christmas '22. I have been on a journey east, spiritually and physically, and Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, Zen, Bon, and Tao all resonate these days. The church still reminds me of 'working hard for the sake of it' Protestantism and empty pews and limp hymns.

It was, therefore, a surprise to be called inside the church I cycled past, as if by some inner voice—something ethereal. Very odd!

Still, I have learned to trust my instincts. I locked my bicycle. The church was built of grey stone slabs, and a giant painted statue of Jesus was hanging from the crucifix above the altar. It was almost lifesize and loomed above me. The church was empty, and the only sound was the swinging of the broad wooden door. I sat and meditated for a while, and then, as if flooded with understanding, I cried. And I couldn't stop crying. This was weird!

In thirty years, I must've gone to church perhaps 1,500 times, and I had never before connected with Jesus hanging from the Cross. I've never really understood what it means for you or me. What is the vitality of that story? Why is it more meaningful than War & Peace or The Odyssey?

Meeting Amma, it was clear that she sees no intrinsic difference between herself and us and the rest of this divine manifestation: the universe. As she sees it, we are all manifestations of Braman, all waves (as Vivivekanana says above) in a vast, numinous ocean. Amma looks out at a crowd and sees one thousand faces, all her face, looking back at her. She understands we are all the same. We are as good as the next individual or the next animal.

And in a way, there is no Amma in any of it. It's either all her or none of it is. The individual disappears! There is an intrinsic equality to existence—all a collective happening in this collective creation. We are busy trying to separate ourselves and be special where we are not. My new shoes or my haircut will make me unique! But there is nothing special about it; it's the most ordinary thing in the world.

So I sat on that cold stone floor, weeping and looking up at Jesus hanging on the Cross that day, and I tried to understand what had clicked. Why did I feel as I felt? Then it came back to me: I must have heard Jesus's words dozens of times around Easter, for decades, preached at me by some flyblown priest about the moment of crucifixion:

'And Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'

I never before got it! But now it was clear! Can you imagine being crucified, the agony of it? Only are the perpetrators so equal to you as to be you; they are closer than your brothers and sisters—you are crucifying yourself in some essential way?

Well, this — I think — is the point of the story. Here, Jesus has supreme compassion to even the people who were crucifying him, which is the same deep compassion that I felt Amma express in her ashram—the compassion of seeing everyone as equal and nobody for better or worse. Compassion is the point of Jesus's tragic story. Feeling in love for one another is the meaning. But it took me 11,000 kilometres and a Hindu sage to realise this, even though hundreds of priests and vicars have told me the same.

I think it's because I had never seen compassion until meeting Amma. Where else do we glimpse genuine, unrestrained compassion?

Of course, for a while, I stopped in every church I cycled past for a good cry. It was cleansing. Today, though my feelings are less intense, I live in comfort with the fact that Amma, Jesus, and Buddha point to the same fundamental truth. The Buddha said, 'Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.' The Bible reads (Galatians 6 3), 'If someone thinks he is somebody when really he is nobody, he is only deceiving himself'. Amma explained: 'You have a body, but you are not the body. You are the nature of infinite power. The entire universe is within you.' — Are they not each saying the same thing?

It was 2008. Five of us went hiking to complete our bronze Duke of Edinburgh award. We were not a cool group: not one of our families owned a hotel in Positano, none of us went to parties in London, we listened to The Fratellis, and probably we didn't know what Supreme was (something we learned in divinity class, certainly not a brand). It was the era of the PlayStation Portable and the iPhone had just been released. We were fourteen-years-old, innocent and inexperienced: Olly, who we'd nicknamed the goose because he resembled one with downy white hair; Michel, who had great gleaming braces; Rob, the tallest of us; Hector Hughes, the shortest (a late bloomer); and me (equally late to bloom!).

My memory is hazy, but we met at a forgettable grey army camp in Dartmoor, in Devon and climbed onto the moors. We camped at night in the tents we carried, and returned, after perhaps a week, sodden. It's exposed up there: the wind blows in from the Atlantic and there's almost no vegetation to break it in—simply featureless moss-green rolling country, patches of low gorse and acres of peat bogs.

For days, in our shrill, unbroken voices, we talked about the weather.

The weather was very bad. The wind carried tremendous heavy clouds to us from the Atlantic, which surrounded and blinded us. It never rained, and yet the moisture in the clouds made everything wet. The clouds moved around us like big grey fish—as if swimming, slowly but resolutely; you could watch them rolling up the hillside and inevitably engulfing us, as if eating us up. Our raincoats became drenched inside and out; our hands and noses dripped onto our maps.

We were often lost. Our OS map would flap relentlessly in the gusting wind. We’d search the horizon physical features from which we could orientate ourselves. All five of us, huddled around a map like penguins staying warm, would together stare at the middle-distance searching for a gravel pit, a scree slope, a bouldery outcrop, or maybe some marsh or bracken or an evergreen coppice. If lucky, we'd spot a church with a steeple in the valley, or walk past a phone box or perhaps a pylon or triangulation pillar. We’d take a bearing, rotate the map 65 degrees, and look up again: but the hideous cloud blanket would have returned, and our gravel pit or cops would have disappeared entirely—magicked away!—poof! The precious pylon, our anchor to reality, was replaced by impenetrable grey mist—gone, it seemed, forever.

But, occasionally, there would be a gap in the clouds, and our visibility would jump from five metres to a kilometre. It would feel like we're coming up for air. We could breathe! Suddenly, we would be blessed with a broad vista to orientate ourselves. And we'd see that long line of pylons to our left and a triangulation pillar to our right and a church with tower on a hill! We'd find our location instantly and trudge along the tiny red-dotted footpath towards our campsite.

I mention all this because I got the same feeling when reading Ulysses: I'd wade through page after page of impossible-to-penetrate prose. I'd be lost, disoriented, somewhat drowning and wet with sweat. And then, as if blessed, the fog would clear, and I'd regain my orientation and enjoy a few pages of delightful narrative. But then, slowly, as if I was sinking into Joyce's confused subconscious, I would begin to lose my way. The clouds would roll in from some Atlantic storm. The landmarks of the plot would disappear, and I'd be left bewildered and grasping for some muddy footpath of a story.

For example, I'd stumble into the following (page 621):

He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?

What am I to do with that? Is it nonsense, or am I too stupid to get it? I am not alone in my confusion. Even Jung found Ulysses challenging:

"The seven hundred and thirty-five pages that contain nothing by no means consist of blank paper but are closely printed. You read and read and read and you pretend to understand what you read. Occasionally you drop through ann air pocket into another sentence, but when once the proper degree of resignation has been reached you accustom yourself to anything. So I, too, read to page one hundred and thirty-five with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way." – Carl Jung, in a 1932 review

But, for an aspiring novelist, it can be rewarding. Rewarding because it shows (a) that you can be experimental with your writing and (b) there are many different ways to write a successful book. Indeed, it was selected as the greatest novel of the twentieth century! Huxley, although he said it's one 'of the dullest books ever written', conceded that Ulysses is a 'a kind of technical handbook, in which the young novelist can study all the possible and many of the quite impossible ways of telling a story…'

I can’t help but feel I am not yet capable of understanding the book, and that there is a seed of brilliance buried inside, beneath those densely filled pages of crazed gibberish. I expect a second or third reading to uncover the magic I have hopelessly missed. After all, Orwell loved the book—he read and reread it for months—and recommended that his various girlfriends read it. (Poor them!). In 1934, he wrote to his girlfriend: '[Ulysses] gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.' I agree: often, the conversations between the characters are so natural, so fun, that 'normal' conversations in other novels feel dry and a little dead.

Moreover, the majority of the book is an investigation into Leopold Bloom's subconscious, and this is interesting.

It's very difficult (impossible, perhaps?) to glimpse another person's subconscious meanderings. Our inner musings, our raving and jabbering, are ours alone. Writing now, I have only a light perception of my self-talk. I see the sign above me: Avocado Cafe; my waiter has bleached his hair, a chef is banging and hacking a pineapple to bits in the adjacent room, and thoughts from my dreams last night return to me. I'm booking a taxi for tomorrow; the waiters hug, brothers? A crowd cheers at the long table, shouting Mister, mister, mister; my glass is empty—shall I get more water? Why is that table so loud? Hard chair. They are wearing Lions International T-shirts… etc. etc. etc.

The subconscious! When you let it go, it just rambles on. And this is what Ulysses does. You start with lucidity, that flash of plot, a moment of sanity, but very slowly, Joyce takes us with him, not really holding our hands but perhaps pushing us into the subconscious—a place unrestricted by the phenomenal realm. Beyond logic and maths, and after gravity. This is an exciting place to be! It might not be a story with a plot, it might not be absorbing the whole time, but it is a new place, a place I haven't visited before; but, like the peat bogs and the wind and the driving rain in Dartmoor, I’m in no particular rush to return.

This month (September) Hector Hughes and I are reading Homer’s Odyssey. Please join us! Read more about our book club and see the full list here.

“Trump can’t keep to the script”, “get back on message”, “talk issues, not personality!”

Lines like this essentially surmise the Republican (and broader) criticism of the Trump/Vance campaign. Why, they ask, can’t he stick to the lines engraved on that teleprompter? Is he stupid? He has one job! It’s his election to lose, they say: just hit Kamala on the border, on inflation, on her record as VP. And, please don’t attack her personality.

But, as we all know, we vote for reasons beyond issues. Did Trump win in 2016 because of his policies? (Of course not). Did BoJo win his original landslide because of his fine-tuned agenda? (He appeared ‘off the cuff’). Does Farage get so much Reform support because of his manifesto? (Nobody read it: it’s because he chats in pubs). Knowing this, it’s clear that Bernie might have beaten Trump were it not for the Democratic primary.

All of these individuals speak without notes. They somehow ‘speak to the common man’ because there is no screen in the way. They speak off-script, sometimes contradicting themselves, often embarrassing themselves, yet talking—it appears—with deep conviction. Even if wrong, it’s obvious to all that their conviction isn’t fed to them by some amorphous ‘Party’. Their mistakes, whether rude or arrogant or misleading, are theirs alone and reveal no script—nobody would type “I’m better looking than Kamala” or “crazy cat ladies” on an auto-cue.

And this is what the public, in essence, wants! Subconsciously, or maybe even consciously, we want people—not faceless Big Brother-like scripts—making decisions on our behalf. Some will refute this claim, claiming we understand policy. I don’t think we do! And I bet the US election will demonstrate (again) that that there is an inverse correlation between reliance on teleprompter and electoral success. In a digital world, we want to appoint people and not machines. Increasingly, regardless of what the polls say, we underestimate the power of talking in public as if speaking to friends: it’s valuable because we see so little of it in politics.

Trump knows this. His party does not. So when there is a party meltdown for his refusal to stay ‘on script’, he goes on. He should probably deviate more! Again, regardless of his policy and the issues, there is something very appealing about seeing somebody willing to make mistakes on stage. To ramble! He realises that people will not vote for him because of his script but because of its absence—because he is a person, not a prop.

While I’ve been sick in bed, I’ve been on YouTube. What else is there to do? And it’s full of long-form interviews where Trump talks and talks and talks without notes (Musk and Theo Von are two interesting examples). Whether you like US politics or not, this is a significant shift: we might see the end of shrink-wrapped performative politics, where everything is planned-out by aids. For too long, too many puppets have been presented to fake crowds (this often happens in the UK).

With personality politics comes, thank god, actual personalities—people, not machines, on both the right and the left. I want more personalities! We must ask, why is the teleprompter used so often? Presumably because most politicians can’t be trusted to be without it. This is tragic. And in the end, if the Conservative Party wants to recover in less than a decade in the UK, it should find leadership willing to sit for unscripted two-hour interviews. They are revealing and force at least some conviction! Isn’t that what we want to see? And even if we disagree with their policies, the agentic individuals who speak honestly, without notes, will build our future, not the cardboard cutouts we’ve accepted for too long.

It's a good title for a post, right? Good memories! Ha! Well, the headache and the boiling over and the sleepless nights make it less fun. However, there is a silver lining: having a blog makes any experience, good or bad, worth it. It's all grist. Column inches. Juice! All, I suppose, great content. 

More than ever, suffering is top-quality content. Or, at least, since the Colosseum closed (games ended in 404 AD) and public executions were outlawed (in 1868 AD in the UK). Our era enjoys Big Brother, Takeshi's Castle, I'm a Celeb, and the 24-hour news cycle. And politics! Politics, really, is one heap of suffering inflicted by the media on politicians and by politicians on themselves (and on us). The drama of it! But who is suffering under the drama? Just as there is no such thing as 'bad' PR, there is no such thing as too much suffering for content. On reflection, I miss a trick not sharing my bleeding heartaches (I never will!). But bring on potholes and bedbugs, dysentery, and, well, Covid, and I'll share it here. (I know you enjoyed the exhaust fumes and horror of wicked National Highway 66 that I hated on–I can see it in the reading stats.)

So, under a face mask, what would you do if you're sick in Kathmandu? 

Well, there is a Rage Room in the adjacent building and I can hear the carefree smashing. (I simply can't wait until I'm better.) But even without a ticket to the Rage Room, Katmandu is a great place to be ill. The city is mysterious. It's a spiritual tapestry of cobbled streets and brick buildings—the bricks are a little smaller than I'm used to seeing, so the buildings have a more higgledy vibe. They are rougher and cuter. Windows are wooden, not PVC plastic. The streets are clean; people don't throw litter. Every third square has a temple (often golden) where old men sit with children and chant and bang drums. They "namaste" me when I walk past; I namaste back, keeping my infectious distance. 

To my British ear, Kathmandu is exotic in a way that Slough or Birmingham or Milton Keynes is not. Why? It's a long way from home, and it's a Buddhist/Hindu culture, so things work differently. Often, the religions' temples are indistinguishable from one another. People look happier, less drawn and grey. People laugh spontaneously! Stray dogs get free food. It's clean, and no one hassles. On first impressions, I sense that people worship the Money God less than in the UK. They appreciate family instead. Just 9% of people live alone—in the UK 37% do. I am never knowingly ripped off. It's cheap; a pot of Darjeeling tea is £0.90, and a plate of momos is £1.50. The city is so close to the Himalayas that you might see those frosted 8,000-metre peaks were it not for the pollution. (The pollution doesn't help with that raspy sandy throat!). Essentially, it's one of those underrated cities that tourists pass through to buy trekking gear and don't hang about in.

But I'm stuck in bed, listening to the monsoon rattle away. I'm not even rushing around—can't—which is very unlike me. I am lounging and eating two meals a day: granola and yoghurt for breakfast and margarita pizza for dinner. Is that balanced? I don't know. I'm re-reading William Boyd, and he makes me cry. Boyd, you are ostensibly trash, so make me feel better! Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was about a young woman who kept trying to kill herself. It didn't cheer me! And J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy book deserves its own post.

What, I wonder, do people do when they are unwell? They eat not quite as healthy as they'd like, they sleep lightly, and they swallow as if testing for a sore throat—ah! still sore, confirmed. We estimate how much more paracetamol can have in the next twelve hours: 3,000 micrograms. 12,000? A billion? Of course, there is much gazing at the world as if it's a film shown on a cheap LCD screen; it is all at arms reach, disconnected and aloof. 

Funnily enough, nothing made me feel better than the second red line on that rapid PCR test! It was real, the symptoms and the aching et al., I thought. Now I can relax. It's not malaria or dengue. "Thank God! It's 'only' covid!". Can you imagine saying that in 2021?!

But who do I celebrate with? A friend messaged to say ‘we all need a bit of positivity in our lives’. Great. Here in Patan on the first floor, I'm not talking to anyone; I'm waiting and waiting and…

I find myself raving! God-damn-it-why-do-I-not-have-the-energy-to-see-the-city-to-party-to-go-running-to-meet-strangers-to-eat-local-food-and-drink-three-cappuccinos-a-day-damn-this-splitting-headache! Bloody, bloody, bloody! In my complaining, which is exaggerated—I’m fine, I have turned, like a drowning man looking for a spiritual lifeboat, to Buddhist teachings for relief.

One teacher is Charlotte Joko Beck, the late Zen teacher, and what she says fixes me better than any paracetamol ever could. She says:

We're always looking for something, waiting for something—for the time which will be perfect, peaceful, better, different, happy. ... But we're not suddenly going to find some mysterious place where all our troubles disappear. Our great life truly is just what we are at this very second. (Listen to the full dharma talk here)

Well, I reflect with the help of Joko's buoyancy aid that perhaps it's good to stop and to be still. Just be. This is it! This technicolour moment is all we have. And our experience is what it is, nothing more or less. In its unique way, it's perfect, incorruptible, transparent, empty, vast, full and luminous. It kind of glows when you look carefully.

It's here right now, with the monsoon filling holes in the pavement and the over-ripe bananas and the fat pigeons cleaning their wings on the temple's golden roof. It's beautiful, with or without a headache.

Still, I'd prefer without; I'll have just one more damned paracetamol. 

For more on why I like travelling to cities, here is a post about why secondary cities are totally underrated. 

—Julley, is that battery acid? I said.

—Julley! Yes, yes, yes…. said the oldest monk of the four.

—I'll carry it, I said.

And with three litres of battery acid, alongside these wonderful monks, I walked up the slippery mountainside towards the monastery. Why that monk needed quite so much battery acid, I never found out. I did, however, discover that monks are not so different from each of us as you might imagine.

It had been a long journey: Two days on the motorbike from Leh (population 31,000) along good roads to Kargil (pop. 16,000). From there, you hook south along broken roads for two more days to Padum (pop. 2,000). Then, damn it, the roads disappear almost entirely, and it's a three-hour off-road adventure. The Indians call these 'Adventure Roads'; they are tracks, not roads, and sometimes you want the adventure over—listen carefully, and you'll hear me beg Ram, Shiva, Buddha, Christ, and Brahman for black-top tarmac.

By now, my lower back ached in spasms from all the motorbike riding. The Royal Enfield Himalayan was suited to these roads, but my body wasn't. Finally, you roll into Purne (pop. 5?) and lock the bike at the roadhead marked by a small empty tin shed, presumably once home to an ancient ticket inspector (has he died of exposure or fled to Leh?). Leave the motorbike helmet hanging in the breeze from the handle bar, and you proceed on foot. Just follow the Lungnak River upstream; it's thick and brown and turbulent.

I walked towards the monastery and dense grey clouds shrouded the mountains above my head; they swelled and grew fatter and began to spit some lightning. The clouds, thick as they appeared, rotated and throbbed, almost like another planet had crossed our orbit. I felt you could walk on their surface. I rushed along the rough mud crack beside the river. Under the hurrying clouds, the face of the mountain was a hearty red. There are constant signs of recent landslides from the monsoons (the Ladakhis call them 'cloud bursts' which sound quaint, somehow disguising their lethal severity). The final river, the crazed Lungnak rapids of melting glaciers (far beyond our horizon), was crossed with a new wooden slatted bridge. Here you might spot monks in burgundy shawls in the distance. I did, and I was thrilled. The gloomy guest house was close by! Then it was a short walk to Phuktal Monastery, which means 'the cave of liberation' in the endangered Zangskari dialect of the Tibetan language.

The whole thing is terrifically romantic. When travelling, the destination is often the goal, but it can disappoint. Who, frankly, wants to reach John o’ Groats? For stale cake and Nescafé coffee at the downtrodden public leisure centre? The ride between Land’s End and John o’ Groats is undoubtedly the pleasure—the journey is the destination. Therefore, I've found that sometimes the destination feels a flop; somehow underwhelming, like becoming a billionaire on paper or that long, blank, final day of a school summer holiday when you have your new shoes ready and crayons packed and nothing to do.

But this destination, at Phuktal Gompa, was no flop! Nor, of course, was the adventure to get there. The monastery, now 2,550 years old, is built in a cave on the side of the mountain. The flat-roofed buildings, which are all subject to seasonal 'slides'—often tragic—are built from mud bricks gathered from the earth of the same mountain. In fact, a couple of Ladakhis were collecting and shaping mud bricks as I approached. "Julley!" we said to one another. Hello, and goodbye, and thank you, said all at once.

I was heading to one of India's most remote Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. This is a silent, sacred, remote spiritual outpost, far-flung and uncorrupted. It didn’t matter that it was raining gently when I arrived at the guest house. Then the rain got very heavy and nearly washed us away, so I stayed inside and had several black teas in the damp dingy dining room (there was no electricity). It was six pm, an hour and a half before sunset, but the clouds brought us a kind of red nightfall that blanketed the valley, wrapping us up. It was, I imagine, what the Day of Judgement will feel like, with the furious thunder rolling from one end of the valley to the other; you could almost see it tumble past. I sat at the paned glass window and waited for the Day of Judgement to be over. Am I going to hell? I wondered. Probably! I thought, cheerily. It did pass. It was only the remnants of a monsoon that had lost her steam, and, now exhausted, had lurched over the Greater Himalayan Range, reaching the Zansakar valley.

Meanwhile, I sat sipping tea: I felt at once tiny and insignificant and in awe.

As the storm cleared, a group of monks arrived, chanting Om Mani Padme Hum, holding prayer beads made from lotus stem, each bound up in their mauve cloaks; shaved heads topped with orange woolly hats made from stiff yak wool. These hats had little ear covers now lifted to resemble little orange elf ears. Elf ears! I grinned as they sat down beside me. The monks have all studied since they were children, either in Phuktal Monastery or Hemis, which is larger and closer to Leh (the regional capital). They were all in their twenties and thirties and had come to the guest house for the Wi-Fi.

Of course! The Wi-Fi! There is something absurd in watching cultures clash: monks scrolling Facebook! Can you imagine! In the same way, you don't expect a priest to smoke hash, or a nun to bungee-jump. These devotees are presumably reasonably well-adjusted, but they are victims of the addictive nature of their screens all the same. Anyway, the monks drained the Wi-Fi. I had wrongly assumed that monks are impervious to the dopamine hit of social media—they are as addicted as you or I. I suppose our reaction should be ‘phew’? Or maybe, ‘oh no, there is zero hope!’ I can only assume they are more mindful when hitting Like and their feed is less horrible, more balanced: Fewer women doing gymnastics, less bullfighting and Pain Olympics, and more cats playing chess. More James Blunt, less J.D. Vance. But we will never know.

I woke up before my alarm. At five, I walked the kilometre to the monastery itself. As I said, it's built into the cave. It's as remote as purgatory, as reachable as Atlantis, as mystical as Babylon. And I went for breakfast! I climbed the steps and wandered through low ceiling tunnels which linked one passage to the next and up more steps designed for little feet so my heels hung off the edges. According to legend, the monk Zangpo caused a spring to appear from the cave and a tree to grow on top of it. Monks later built a honeycomb of houses and meditation rooms. The sky, by 05:15, had become that washed-out blue, ready for the sun to start climbing but not yet rid of nightfall—some stars still hung high above me. The yellowed brick buildings almost lit up the dank passageways as I reached the meditation hall. Two wooden doors swung open silently, revealing a room draped in coloured fabrics, royal blue and deep green and reds and yellow; all gold trimmed and hanging dead still in the morning light. We (the monks and I) took our cushions in front of a blazing golden Buddha, who sat with his eyes ajar, his lips in an eternal smile, peacefully inviting us into enlightenment. The puja began (the morning ceremony) and I sat with my eyes closed next to a friend of mine, Sid, who I had met the night before. The monks went on with their chanting, interrupted only by a blow-legged man who came in and out of the hall with an enormous silver teapot, suspended between his legs, from which he poured butter tea, made from yak butter, into neat ceramic cups that the monks unbundled from somewhere in their gowns. So the great low groaning and bellowing and chanting of the twenty-five monks (aged from nine to perhaps one hundred) was complimented by the shleuurrr shluurpping shlerpp of monks sipping their hot butter tea. From my cushion, I could see out into the adjacent room, where, on an open fire, the bow-legged man returned to as he boiled another vast kettle.

After the puja, the child monks began studying (and throwing rocks at one another). Sid and I watched the sunrise from the roof of the monastery,

—It can't be chance, it can’t be; there must be something else going on, something deeper, said Sid.

—What do you mean? I said.

—Do you really think billions of years of accidents created all of this?

Well, I didn't think it could be mere ‘chance’ either, but I said nothing. What could I say? No words, blunt as they are, could have captured how I felt as I stood in that valley: I felt alive! I felt both small and vast; empty and completely full. The sun was splintering over the horizon, and last night’s stars were going out one by one. The red rocks were sharp against the blue sky, and the brown river below continued to rush with the icy glacial waters. It's too damn beautiful to be an accident, I thought; it’s too dramatic and too surreal.