Russian dolls

It has been a strange old week this one, as full of the foreboding thunder heads of introspection on the inside as the rain and the sun have battled it out for the upper hand on the outside. A week when my internal monologue has been quite at odds with my external conviviality. A week when the gnarled hand of my inner hermit threatens to reach out and pull the hood of disengagement over my eyes at the same time as I’m laughing.

That this contradiction is part of my nature I know only too well. Maybe it’s part of all people’s natures to simultaneously wish to be at the centre of things and a thousand miles away. To be with others and yet to be alone in the company of creatures that don’t speak in words. To exist only in the way that the elements exist: timeless, free-floating, flowing and rippling like a warm summer breeze through endless uninterrupted acres of corn.

It seems to be hard-wired into our human circuitry to search for certainty, to look for our security and our freedom through the presence of boundaries. We define ourselves and our sense of belonging, from the minor to the major, like life-sized Russian dolls stacked one inside the other: me, my mind, my ego, my body, my home, my family, my street, my town, my county, my country, and so on until we reach the outer shell, my world. We like these anchors and we feel lost without them, misplaced and homeless like a stray dog.

We like too to think of our position in the bigger jigsaw and seek out our own boundaries in relation to other people, both those we know – friends, family, colleagues – and those we don’t but who nevertheless have a bearing on us; politicians, say, or people we admire for their talents or achievements. As life itself provides us with only two actual certainties - birth and death - we spend our days in active pursuit of a range of others to take our minds off the dread of the unknowable and the unpredictable. And so we weave a complex pattern of commitments, relationships, promises, beliefs and obligations – deadlines, if you like, to take our minds off our own dead line.

But it is in the nature of the only two certainties we have as humans that we have our proper connection with the world. All living things, from amoebae and plankton to queens and presidents, share this common bond, this golden thread that unites us and everything. How ironic that we are the only species that knows this and yet try our best to deny what everything else on the planet takes for granted. How peculiar that we attempt to capture and contain and measure the time that passes when it passes just the same if we ignore it. How very human.

So yes, a strange old week, spent not feeling sad or melancholy but simply pondering.