Lying fallow

I love my phone because it means I can (almost) always, (almost) everywhere, do a search.

I can fill up any spare time with new images, ideas and information. It's a great luxury - it's like having a reference library, personal assistant and messenger service in my pocket. I make notes, update the shared shopping list, keep in touch. I slightly struggle to remember how life actually felt in the pre-smart phone days, let alone the pre-mobile ones.

I can be always doing something.

But this blaze of productivity drowns out the moments of silence, of vulnerability, of serendipity. I distract myself from worry in the doctor's waiting room. I protect myself from social awkwardness in the after school pick up playground. I'm never at a loose end.

Being productive is great, but it's blinkered. It requires blinkers. We canter down the focus road, seeking to avoid being distracted or unnerved by irrelevant things to right or left. A 'window' in your calendar is asking to be filled. We think of open space as empty space - we call land that isn't beautiful to us or useful to us 'waste land'.

Crop rotations used to include fallow time and it supported the rest of the cycle. The wild flower meadows kept the pollinators going between the short flowering of crop, as well as allowing the soil to recover and the small animals to have somewhere to nest, forage and hunt. Some farmers are starting to experiment with bringing back strips of fallow, wild areas and giving space to their hedgerows.

In urban and office life, we must defend the fallow spaces in the day from smart phones and productivity. I'd like to point out that I mean defend the genuinely fallow time. Scheduling a yoga class, joining an educational guided nature walk or meditation group is not fallow - although it probably is worth doing. Fallow time is weed-filled, and non-productive.  Fallow is a pyjama day where the laundry doesn't get done. If it's a fallow day then you can answer a knock on the door without a change of plan, you can turn a quick phone call into a long chat because nothing is going on. You might end up tidying a cupboard because you're looking for the risotto rice and it's right at the back. But you didn't plan to, or it's not fallow time.

Fallow time offers recuperation, an openness to happenstance, and asks you to stop living your life so that your life can live you. Mark some in your diary now, and then visit your life without farming it. You might be surprised by what starts growing.

New eyes

I tested some new eyes at the weekend. There was an optical equipment fair at a nearby nature reserve and high end binoculars took my breath away.

For decades, modest binoculars have been lurking compactly at the bottom of my bag; an underused cousin to wallet, phone and keys. It turns out good optics are actual magic: not just a bit clearer, but an actual super-power. Like poaching a hawk's vision. Such clarity, focus, detail. Reaching crisp and bright into the distance: creeping invisibly up on wildlife to drink in their detail. I'm in love.

It's also true of wetsuits. Till February this year, I looked at those few seal-like surfers in grey Cornish waves and considered them ridiculously hardy. Fit and skilled they certainly are, but with a winter wetsuit (including hood and boots), I wandered into that wintry sea as open and comfortable as if it was my living room. I have the sea in winter too - that's as near magic as I expect to get.

This kind of magic is what people do: increase our control, our speed and our freedom. Binoculars render me almost disembodied: reliably unseen, unheard and unsmelled, while I watch birds. A wetsuit changes my personal season - it's warm enough to swim all year round. We can schedule reminders, emails, blog posts. Come to that literacy is so deeply integrated into who I am that pen and paper, or at least keyboard, are very much the tools I use to think with, not just tools for sharing my thoughts after the fact.

But no binoculars in the world can turn the first sight of noisily nesting black-headed gulls, into a diverse mix of seventeen species. That takes patience and attention. It takes openness to whatever is, even if - this time - it is only black-headed gulls after all.

We augment our powers, but only the active ones. It's not so easy to augment the passive ones of receiving, of attending. But the balance is important, and our tools unbalance it. There's nothing to buy which offers the attention span of a hawk to go with it's vision, the patience of a tree to match the timeproofness of wetsuits and scheduled blog posts. I wish there was.

The love of sheep

I'm recovering from reading Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie. Almost too wonderful: interesting, wise, unshowily elegant. As soon as the exhilaration wore off, I began to wonder if there is any point in my writing when this book has already been written. What on earth could anyone have to add?

In our overcrowded world, this fear lurks at the bottom of many minds. It's surely beneath all the sales of motivational and self improvement products. There's always something or someone better out there.

Categorising is an effective way to deal with the huge size and complexity of the modern world. You can't read the back of and dip into every book in a bookshop, let alone on Amazon. But you know you like books by author X or in genre Y. Starting there saves time.  But categorising is not a neutral act, it ripples back upstream: bookshops categorise by genre, and publishers in turn encourage authors to stay filed in genres. News is categorised as 'world', 'health', 'environment', a big story or a merely local one. We categorise each other and we categorise ourselves: are we geeky, social, travellers, parents, booklovers? It's a useful way to navigate our expanded world - we know what size clothes to take to the fitting room.

When I read Sightlines it was natural to compare my writing, because it shares a category: I don't feel daunted by novels in the same way. But she threw me a line in 'Aurora', as she looks back at their ship, surrounded by icebergs:

"Though white, the ship looks dirty ... the way sheep suddenly look dirty when it snows"

That's the point. Categories lead us to focus on the abstract quality, and seduce our love out of the actual content of the life we are living. An appreciation of real sheep, rather of the category fluffy whiteness, is appreciation that will stand firm when it snows. If it is the sheep you love to see, then snow will make that love blossom forth into a love of mottled gray-brown, a love of hanky texture, a love of steamy bleating made visible in cold air.

Abstract thought has proved its worth with many excellent fruits: cars, solar panels, refrigeration and mobile phones, but it is dangerous. Abstracts bring ideals and ideals oppose life, reducing it to mere shadows on the cave wall, while outside we imagine perfection romping in the sunshine of truth. The great gift of being alive is to revel in the details - enjoying them as particulars, not imperfections. A hot chocolate moustache after a day in the cold, a worn cuff on a favourite jacket, evening light sliding under the clouds.

It's not for us to judge whether our contribution is worth making. All we can do is make it, in detail. Particularly.

Aaagh! Stuff!

How many products and services promise to simplify your life? There are books, blogs, storage solutions, handy organisers, decluttering advice professionals and TV insights into other people's stuff endgame... the list goes on, and with barely a trace of irony.

Last time we went on holiday I realised that the great sigh of relief I felt when we got to the apartment was as much about its relative emptiness as about having finished the journey. Wow, I thought. If I go on holiday partly to get away from my possessions, then surely when I get home, I can get rid of 80% of everything and feel on holiday all the time! I came home determined. And I can't do it. 

Some of the stuff is sentimental and charged with tenderness. Some of it is beautiful and gives me daily joy. But really a great deal of it just might-come-in-handy-one-day. This final category is both hardest to defend and hardest to control. So what is it about, really?

For a start: the might-come-in-handy stuff does, in fact, come in handy. I recently re-covered dining room chairs with material stashed for more than a decade. Like advertising, more than half of might-come-in-handy stuff is pointless, but nobody knows which half.

To continue: it's recycling: I have stuffed several craft projects over the years with the insides of an old duvet kept for that purpose.

And finally, like Walt Whitman, 'I am large, I contain multitudes'. I go off some clothes, craft techniques, sports, and then a few years later, I take them up again. Keeping stuff is a way to hang on to options. My collection of tools and materials is the first stage of work on future projects, many of which have not yet broken the surface of consciousness. The stuff is in my mind, as well as my house.

A commonly used creativity technique takes two apparently unrelated objects challenging you to make connections. My stuff gives me that work out all the time. I'm writing at my desk, and it presents me with supermarket vouchers, a pine cone, loom bands, some pebbles, felt pens, a little resin sculpture, lego, and other items. Some offer memories, some remind me of plans and some I just seem to have hung onto. They all become talismans connecting me to ideas and emotions, including some only half-conscious ones which as they can't be explicitly noted down would otherwise trickle away.

Whenever a talisman pops up in my visual field, a bunch of associated thoughts and feelings get a little charge of attention. They are briefly introduced to whatever I'm thinking about at the time. My home is thus an extension of my brain, and I am thinking in it outside my head; layering plans, memories and symbols together. 

Sometimes I want to escape to the purity of a single note, a sparsely furnished holiday home, and a great empty sea horizon. It's restful. But it's good to come back to the complexity and richness of a life which has a past, a future, and a multi-stranded present.

Go down to the sea

I must go down to the sea, to the lonely sea and the sky, (from Sea Fever, by John Masefield)

The impulse to go off into the woods, down to the sea or up on the moor is all about the impulse to look away from the human. To stop staring into the mirror of culture and find something else, something beyond: a breath of fresh air.

It is the fundamental spiritual urge. Spiritual as opposed to the religious urge, because religion is a cultural vessel for spirituality. Whether religious or not, almost everyone has an upwelling desire to try and see past our human perspective and this is a spring which pours through our lives. It might run partly through religious canals, which are after all designed for it (some might say to contain it, and some might say to harness its power), or it might find its own way entirely: waterfalling, streaming or seeping through our inner marshland as a sense of wonder, of beauty, a feeling for the wild.

The Oxford Junior Dictionary shed lots of its nature words a few years ago, to make room for the new words which have become prominent in the lives of most young children now. Words like attachment and chatroom displaced words like acorn and conker. It's a sign that we're allowing ourselves to fall more deeply into human life, and away from the more-than-human.

I lived for a while in a very landlocked and urban part of the country, and hearing the cries of seagulls in the background of phone calls home used to feel like a huge breath opening in my chest. I didn't know then what I know now - that I have to attend to the non-human. Thankfully, I can get basic rations by watching birds who still whirl through the air in our streets and parks, by noticing the fungi which spring up after autumn rain, by giving myself up to the clouds out of the window, or by looking closely at a wildflower by the side of the road. But you have to pay the attention, and very humble things like pigeons, clouds and weeds are hard to attend to in our world of global image-sharing.

We hungrily consume 'nature' on computers and TVs. Fabulous footage of distant places, amazing plants, extraordinary animals. Photos of beautiful landscapes, wild skies, green river valleys. But the trouble is, it's not nature. It's photography. You don't get a lungful of it. It doesn't soak the bottom of your jeans and you don't get to pick a bit of it up and carry it home.

Like Narcissus, we are held in a gaze of rapture. We think it's nature, the other, but it's still just us. We need to look away and go down to the sea, or at least the park, before we drown in our reflection.

Location, location, location

Not so long ago, 20 years if that, I'd arrange to meet a friend a few days in the future and a little before the appointed time, I'd take a jacket with my keys and wallet in the pocket and set out. It feels brittle now - no means of communicating to repair or even improve plans on the fly. You'd stick to the plan, or stand your friend up. No other choices.

The first one to arrive would wait because how else would we find each other? Some people would wait longer than others, some would be more punctual than others. If someone didn't show up at all, you'd assume something quite bad had happened, although you wouldn't be able to call and find out till you'd definitely given up on them - because in order to do so, you'd have to leave the meeting point to find a call box, and the longer after the meeting time that was the more danger your friend would arrive, and on seeing you not there, assume you'd already left and leave again too.

Now we can communicate with anyone we know wherever they are. We carry all our contacts with us all the time. It's great.

But experiences still happen in specific places. I was in the rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey when I got a call telling me about my father's heart attack. That was over a decade ago and he recovered well, but the memory remains in that rose garden, part of what flits through my head whenever I'm there in that part of the year.

I covered a box file with woven paper strands while listening to a really moving afternoon play on the radio. I eventually had to get rid of the file, because I'd woven the story into it and it was much too harrowing to be reminding myself of on a daily basis.

We often holiday in the same town and have built up a patina of happy memories in the place: we all relax when we arrive. It's as if there are ruts worn into the place which make it hard not to be happy there.

I find it difficult to do certain parts of my day job from home, because my contact with the details of the meetings, calls and emails is much stronger when I sit at the desk or make tea in the kitchen where I had them. It's as if part of my memory is encoded outside my skin, perhaps in the arrangement of post-it notes, lego and paperclips on my desk.

Everything happens somewhere, and it leaves a mark on both the thing and the where, at least as they exist in the minds of the players. Everything may well be connected, but it isn't all here. If you google 'living in the present moment' you will find thousands of considerations of the importance of attending to now rather than losing yourself in regret and nostalgia for the past or plans and anxieties for the future. But just try looking for 'living in the present place': it's clearly not an issue.

Regardless of mobiles and the internet, we are still creatures, and we have a location. Where we are is meaningful. It's hard to talk about the importance of proximity without sounding parochial - the very word has become negative, when it used not to be. We know of a bigger world, but we live in a small one. No matter how much we travel, we are only actually in one place at a time. We may stay in one place long and deeply, or flit and skitter over a wide area, and that will affect the thoughts we think, but not how many hands we can hold at once, and what that holding means.

Poisonous aspirations

These days we set objectives and fill up our diaries months ahead. We strive continually to improve ourselves: physically, psychologically, intellectually, spiritually. There's a truly massive industry supported by our sense that we are not fit, serene, rich, beautiful, happy, stable, educated, witty, creative, productive or just plain good enough.

We also have instant access to images which show how far short of the ideals we fall. No matter we know many of these images photoshop the truth: with their aid, we can vividly imagine and compare ourselves to the dream. Now some would say that the urge to be a better version of yourself is wholly a good thing, that it keeps us from becoming complacent slobs, wasting our talents on a life of TV and junk food.

I'm starting to think that the story of the Fall from Eden is all about this. Once you have knowledge of perfect 'Good', it is extremely difficult not to strive for it, or to fear, judge and attempt to conceal your lack of it. These are the features of being fallen, and shame at one's nakedness makes a good symbol. Nakedness is vulnerability, honesty - introducing the separation of good and evil leads to anxiety, grief and a desire to cover oneself.

But we don't learn best when we feel stupid, and regimes based on denial can take us only to the limit of our will power. Willpower is a finite mental resource, besides depleting other functions when it's being used. It's a temporary, stop-gap approach: it can't be the foundation of anything.

We all know that the second something is identified as a 'target' for some business or public service it becomes much less useful and generates unfortunate side effects into the bargain. Making something a target changes its relationship with its context.

I recently heard about a hospital target set to discharge recovered patients by 11am. Intended to speed up release of both the patient and the bed, in practice it led to some patients staying an extra night so that the target could be achieved... the following day. Similarly, we rank schools by exam results, and unwittingly affect the attention given to everything else that happens there: healthy physical, emotional and social development, creativity, self discovery. A growing body of research shows that when we reward children for anything we quickly re-focus their interest towards the reward and away from what we were actually trying to encourage. And this seems to be the case even if the activity we were rewarding was something they wanted to do in the first place.

Let's all stop looking over our shoulders at ideals of mind, body, heart and soul, and instead let our current lives fill up our whole attention. We're not perfect. Nobody can actually be perfect: perfect is a moment, as considered in a particular context. It's not something that can be an ongoing attribute of a living being. The attention you withdraw from striving can be reinvested in your actual life. And that will surely lead to learning and growth and do so easily because the effort is drawn from you by interest and supported by what's around you.

So put aside objectives and aspirations: they cast you out of Eden. Make peace with fallibility, your own and everyone else's, and you'll be instantly back there, and realise that you never really left.