Basically, it’s all in your mind. And, as a consequence, if you want to be free of your misery, your discontent, your sadness and depression, there’s little point changing your external circumstances. Because, as squinting mindfulness zealot, John Kabat-Zinn once wrote, wherever you go, there you are.
And yet…when for Christmas 1996, my brother bought me a one-way Eurostar ticket to Paris, my life changed utterly.
And utterly for the better.
Even after the evidence that getting out of your hole gets you out of your hole, I still persisted in the belief that if I was suffering, it was fruitless to rearrange the external furniture and all about the architecture of your mind.
I remember vividly sitting on the toilet at the Refugee Council just before the start of my class a year after I returned from Paris. These were long classes, 10am-5pm with an hour off for lunch and I was dreading the day. I wanted to hang out at the fountain on Clapham common with the winos, like Charles Bukowski. But the problem had to be with me. If I was more compassionate, more attentive, more mindful, I would sail through these classes on a magic carpet of bliss. I prayed and meditated to be made a better person, to find that elusive satisfaction in my work. To put the needs of my students before my own.
Then I flushed the loo.
A few months later, I was having cocktails in Brixton with a colleague from the Refugee Council who I had fallen quite ardently in love with. We were out late and my girlfriend was waiting for me back at our Fulham home.
“I want to wake up every morning feeling that my working day is no different from a holiday. I want to frazzle the distinction between work and play…that’s to say I want my work to feel like play.”
I was lit up.
She smiled with her whole body. Outside Brixton tube in the dark, I hurried our goodbye kiss before it could become something more and cycled back to Fulham.
22 years later and I still haven’t got there.
And I’m beginning to doubt if ever I will.
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