I don’t often write in the morning,
my brain and the body that houses it have not normally gained the necessary
momentum; this has something do to with the process of remembering I’m alive
and what a dizzy thing that really is. I start my day as a bleak little tadpole
and end it a leaping dancing frog, I would rather it that way round I think. It
is a journey with a positive trajectory at least. Well then today is an exception,
one I will cherish. This incongruous event has been provoked by one
particularly long and entrancing conversation held last night. Leaping and
dancing? Well I had been croaking all night. I had spent the night with friends
fully immersed in a dalliance of drink and the metaphysical. Such ideas were to
blame for my night time jittering’s. Not unusually it all dispersed an
existential fog over everything, yet the fog was punctuated by brief moments of
unified clarity and hope.
So there I was, an over active
tired blur, sat on the platform my wild hair framing bleary twitching eyes. The
only sleep I had got that night was of a very foreign quality. One where my
body was relaxed and sunken but my mind busy, busy connecting vivid, colourful,
spurious events. I am not one to normally separate notions of mind and body too
violently, but that moment they seemed autonomous and indifferent to one
another. I had spent the night laid in a Jacuzzi watching a circus.
A voice rung out announcing the
arrival of my train, as the pace of the women’s spiel increased so the list of
stops accompanied the wobbling passengers aboard. The last few stops tumbled
out of the intercom at break neck speed as though she was goading me into a
run; I too staggered into the train. I looked around the carriage and recalled a
book my dad was reading the last time I saw him, ‘Alone Together’. At the time
my first slightly bemused thought was that it must be a book about marriage.
But on closer inspection I saw it was in fact about the age of technology and
its implications on social interaction. Typical of dad who proudly wears the T
Shirt my brother and I made him for his birthday which reads ‘I hate
com-poo-ters’ along with a picture of a turd inside a computer monitor. It’s a common
pastime, I suspect, to break down the breakdown of society whilst on a train.
To comment on our individualistic defaults, people unable to relate anaesthetised by fear and convention etcetera. But as I took my seat by the
toilet and allowed the wall of smell to settle on me, I instead became
interested in the moments of connection, flickers in the train, as individuals
acknowledged their shared reality. A conspicuous bang and shudder created such
a moment, as I shared a weary smile with a women waiting outside the toilet for
her young son. It was the guard’s presence that temporarily jolted us into the
reality of our collective present,
“Leeds! They used to have a
football team didn’t they?”
His joke provoked various titters;
conversation even as he went on in this way to check someone else’s ticket. Just
enough time to bathe in the liquid realisation that we were all on the same
train heading somewhere together, before retreating back into the security of
our own worlds. All of us islands again, aided by our books, wires and flashes or
in my case a vacant veneer and a pen.
I settled my thoughts once again on
last night. I had developed grand titles for my friends to frame the
conversation in, they went as follows: ‘The political historian whose passion
and wit is tempered by an involuntary scepticism he no longer wants’ and then
‘The philosopher who’s rhetoric cleverly illustrates simplicity and complexity
and who’s own faith has undergone a recent raw refining.’ And finally ‘The
adventurer with a scientists mind and Christian faith. I got to my own grand title,
I was unsettled, my own faith was a baffling cocktail, ardent and yet
stubbornly disobedient to any kind of description. A Christian mystic operating
within an abstract positivity. The titles do not suffice, none of them. This
emphasised what we had experienced that night, none of those titles render the
beliefs of the individual comprehensible, that I suppose is what actions are
for, what our lives are for, to create something.
For the most part our own worlds
are havens, where we collect ourselves and find reason to be. Yet there is an
eastern version of Descartes supposition which reads ‘I think therefore I am…
not’. Our havens can be filled with substances other than thought. These havens
can behave like wild animals, they are dangerous, when challenged they fight or
withdraw and yet they contain a purity of life within them too. It can be a
traumatic experience to doubt or refine those beliefs that have driven us
forward thus far, now to a place of uncertainty. We are ships at sea, buffeted
by swell and sweat. Watching the sunlight streak and wobble through the trees by
the track I realise the faith I operate within day to day is childlike. My base
childlike beliefs provoke openness, a faith which means simultaneously
exercising doubt with a trust that good is possible and love exists. I have
plenty of intellectual reasons why such a faith is worth protecting but I'm not
sure that’s the point. Looking again around the train, and remembering my
everyday life I acknowledge we often duck these kinds of conversations. Perhaps
this is because through them we encounter the wildness of our havens, which we
routinely pacify and contain for reasons like the largeness of space or the
importance of I. We avoid them because they make us vulnerable. We fear the loneliness they induce, a startled
realisation, other people do not see things as we do, and even when they were
using the same words they meant something else. Fly in the face of this fear
with defiance and courage I say in a moment of boldness. We must confront the loneliness, in this
sense we must be alone together. Only then will we truly find and cherish those
moments of clarity, unity and light and be transformed. This is a train
momentarily emerging from the fog.
