I Could Have Been Nothing

Never forget that heartbeat pendulum of logic swings on our childish astonishment at the wonder of being alive. Grounding ourselves in the thought that we could as easily not be as be.

Happy Friday!

And a warm welcome from the Ness.

Coming from a country where about 200 million cups of tea and coffee are drunk every er — checks notes — day, it feels at least mildly interesting to reveal that I haven’t had a drop of either for a week.

Instead, I’ve been chugging down 20g of a suspicious white powder every morning.

Historically beloved of bodybuilders, creatine is showing research-grade promise supporting brain function in people managing age-related cognitive decline and sleep deprivation — without the jitters and crashes of caffeine.

So I thought I’d give it a go.

I have thus far failed to convince any of my friends or family to try this tiny experiment, so here I am inviting you.

20g creatine monohydrate (or two doses of 10g) in a smoothie or swished into a shot of water, every morning, for a week or so.

If you email me your experience, I’ll email back with mine.

For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor, cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel, Expeditions Manager at British Exploring Society, and Advanced Wilderness Therapeutic Guide in training.

Yes, that is too many hats.

In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.

Sometimes I am sleep-deprived.

Also: what is this insect?

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Infinitely Grateful: Night Shift Part 2

This is a continuation of the story I began last week. You can read that here: Unbelievably Lucky: Night Shift Part 1.

If you can’t be bothered to go back, the first part ended shortly before midnight, after a close encounter with a nightjar in the New Forest.

The sycamore itself is no mere bystander. We are inextricably connected, exchanging gases in the kiss of life. Sycamore breathes out, David breathes in; David out, sycamore in.

The nightjar and I hang there together for one, two, three moments — me praying thankful in the gorse, he in the airspace, eyeballing me from three angles, passing on some sort of blessing, before skipping away into the night air.

Transformation

Midnight.

My major muscle groups fizzed with the exhilaration. A close encounter with a rare thing of nature does that — and darkness makes those encounters more likely. In most places, the night belongs to the wild things. In some places, it’s their last refuge.

My legs jangled from my hips, barely knowing, scarcely caring in my joy, where I stumbled, and a steady wind blew from the southwest.

I came across a pond, an unnatural pool scooped from the earth dug for three Bronze Age barrows, burial chambers for forgotten ancestors. A quiet space in a quiet place, where the dry summer had vapourised half the water, leaving a deep rim around the bowl that made a bench.

I knew immediately: here I would have a moment. So I sat down on the bank, pulled out my Neo typewriter and poured myself a Thermos cup of ceremonial cacao.

Then — bidding the incongruous prompt of ChatGPT — I guided myself on an intention-setting therapeutic exercise.

As per the generated instruction, for about five minutes I did nothing but whisper into the blackness, over and over:

I am here.

I welcome the dark.

I open to what wants to come.

Alternating cacao and mantra, I ask my empty mind: ‘What needs to shift?’

In the darkness, the question burrows into the fundamentals. It’s hard to answer glibly when there is no one here to impress. The loneliness is evidence that I am here for myself.

So: what needs to shift?

The question sings of the flow of energy: where do I feel blocked?

The answer came almost automatically: in the easy unfolding of my relationships with others. In the parries and thrusts, stalled negotiations, cold wars and Berlin walls of my closest relationships.

And it’s as clear to me that this isn’t a ‘them’ problem.

What needs to shift is the energy of my inner critic: that voice inside my head who so smoothly, so viciously, has as its habit the psychological evisceration of my self and my closest loved ones — the closer, the more vulnerable the target.

That needs to shift, desperately: my self-defensive background sense of Not Good Enough.

In the darkness, before the barrows as my witness, there is no hiding place. It is so simple here: if I am to live, this is what must gently shift.

But perhaps shift isn’t quite the right metaphor. Shifting suggests effort: the pressing of my shoulder to the heavy stone of my obstacle. But I stand no chance of winning a duel with my own psyche.

The arms only strengthen the enemy.

In the darkness, the metaphor turns from shift to sidestep. The night teaches us other ways of sensing the world.

Side Quest: The Choice

There’s never much point explaining a moment of the ineffable to another person.

Experiences like my Night Shift are fragile; forcing them into words can crumple the effect, leaving both parties shrugging their shoulders.

Shared too early, we can feel silly — maybe this wasn’t such a profound experience after all. Maybe I should forget the whole thing and go back to my old life, before the shift.

But I’ve had a month to metabolise what happened that night. It’s safe to share. Even if you think it sounds a bit lame.

I watched The Matrix the other night and realised it might help me jump the fence of ineffable that stands between you and me, a popular metaphor that hints at what lay behind my Night Shift moment by the pond. So here goes.

Life itself isn’t a choice. I’m here on earth already breathing and pumping blood. But how I experience this life is a choice.

This is a revelation that needs to be learnt and relearnt a thousand times in a lifetime, stated and restated anew for every generation.

The Choice was a basic tenet of Stoicism millennia ago, and can be traced centuries earlier, through Taoism, Buddhism, mystical Christianity and Islam, right up to twentieth century Existentialism and Logotherapy, Alcoholics Anonymous and Crossfit.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

That is The Choice.

The Blue Pill

Take the blue pill and I can stay in the world as it is — and always has been — presented to me. Feel the pain and suffer.

Swallowing the blue pill is to experience a world where a rough few months at work is total burnout, an unjust parking fine is wall-punch aggravation, and an argument about washing up bowls is the actual heat-death of the universe.

The blue pill is the choice to press on as I am: to pull the wool back over my eyes and, in a way, resist my own experience, fight against the unfolding of life as-it-is.

Pain is suffering.

The Red Pill

The red pill is the choice to surrender: to sit with the suffering and marvel at the reality of life as-it-is.

The darkness, the nightjars, the forest, pond and sky, were so close upon me that I couldn’t even remember where I keep my stash of blue pills. So, instead, I took what the universe offered me, swallowed, and washed the red pill down with bitter cacao.

The Night Pill

Okay, enough with the red pill blue pill chat. This isn’t science fiction. Our organs are not being harvested for energy by an artificial super intelligence. (Not yet.)

Nevertheless, I suspect most of us, most of the time, live inside a comforting but egotistical fiction that leaves us fighting too hard against reality. I do.

But I can make a choice.

I can choose no critiquing, no complaining and no blaming. Winning by clever argument is no substitute for generosity to others. I choose generosity to others. We are all equal in darkness and light.

We are not main characters in the universe. Our existence as organisms is not ordained by a higher power. And, in a world where we could just as easily not exist, any experience of consciousness is a bona fide miracle.

As Alan Watts said:

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

When you think about it, that’s quite something. How lucky we are. How grateful we must be. For all this.

A humbling moment with the universe, in the darkness of a midsummer night, is all it takes to bring this home.

Return

My moment by the pond was over by 1 a.m. The night had still five hours to unfold. I spent those five hours exploring my fear in the forest, the uncanny calls of the night beasts, searching my heart for a place of stillness, and using the percussion of my footsteps to beat my set intention into the blood of my veins.

When dawn came, I was almost unready.

As I walk through the stark early morning light, unflinching in its attention to detail, I force my eyes to notice all the things they could not notice through the night, those things of the day taken for granted, when the world is bathed in light.

After twenty-four hours of wakefulness, instead of my growing obsession with sleep, I force focus on the already fading wonder I’d felt so strongly in the pond-pool darkness.

Eyes fixed on popping contrast between lime flowers and blue morning, I whisper a memory-mantra to myself, pulling hard on the cable end of my nighttime revelations and, with effort, plug The Choice into my daytime reality.

I could have been anything.

I could have been nothing.

I am unbelievably lucky to be something, right here, with all these beings, the lime flowers, the thousands of lime flowers — unbelievably lucky — right here!

I am infinitely grateful to be anything, right now, with all these beings, the thousands of lime flowers supporting me, nurturing me — infinitely grateful — right now!

What an incredible experience being is.

There is a tick-tock logic to this. A cogito for humility. Not ‘I think therefore I am’, but ‘I am therefore I am grateful’.

Existence begets gratitude.

And, if we dare, we can take our tick-tock two steps further. As Melanie Klein wrote in On The Sense of Loneliness:

If this gratitude is deeply felt, it includes the wish to return goodness received and is thus the basis of generosity.

And generosity is the very opposite of selfishness, per Anthony Seldon:

Happiness is the very opposite of selfishness.

Existence-gratitude-generosity-happiness-existence.

Never forget that heartbeat pendulum of logic swings on our childish astonishment at the wonder of being alive. This is something we can return to, over and over, grounding ourselves in the thought that we could as easily not be as be.

How unbelievably lucky we are, how infinitely grateful.

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Thank You

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As always, thank you for your eyeballs and thanks for your support.

diwyc,
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