Secret Yearnings

Waiting for me on the mat are several packages containing books – one of which is Milner’s second book: An Experiment in Leisure. I sit at the kitchen table, thumbing through it.

But as soon as I begin reading I realize that this is much more than a book about how to use one’s leisure time. In fact, it seems to take up where A Life of One’s Own left off.  Here, Milner continues her investigation into what she wants to do with her life by trying to identify the things that feel important to her or interest her in some inexplicable way. I feel a jolt of excitement, as though I’ve picked up a familiar scent and found the trail again. Like me, Milner seems to be trying to identify her yearnings.

Like Booth, Milner believes that most people are out of touch with their own experiences. She recalls trying to teach psychology to a class of adult learners. ‘What struck me most,’ she says, ‘apart from their enthusiasm for learning, was their fondness for arguing about abstractions in contrast with their marked inability to say anything at all about the richness of their own varied day to day living.’[i] Most of us don’t notice what we notice. Paying attention to our feelings while we’re having them is difficult.

But Milner has a brainwave. Like any good introspective journalist, she has long been keeping diaries. So, she turns to a nature diary she wrote when she was just eleven years old, to see if she can detect a pattern in the things that captured her attention. Milner’s diaries describe a dead cuttlefish lying in the mud, and a blackbird’s nest that charmed Milner because it was lined with red wool that came from a rug in her own house. Milner at eleven describes ‘owls hooting on a starlit night when it’s a little bit frosty’, and one day she finds the chrysalis of a death’s head moth and takes it home, but is disappointed when it hatches into a more common species.

Reading about these things even years later, Milner can still recall the feelings of fascination they evoked at the time. She concludes that all these images were important by analogy; they’re symbols for her unexpressed desires. Where words are blunt instruments that label a thing and diminish its true value, a symbol makes things bigger than they are. Symbols are images that point to the ineffable.

The strange fascination that drew Milner to ancient places, therefore, didn’t belong to the places themselves, but was only a ‘clue pointing further’. The symbols that Milner is drawn to symbolize something else, something inside her, something that’s ‘too dimly felt or too complex and obscure to be expressed more directly’.[ii] They reflect Milner’s deepest, most ineffable yearnings back at her like mirrors, or clues, or symbols in a dream.

I wish I’d kept my diaries. Then I remember my Nuggets. Why didn’t I think of them before? I’ve been collecting descriptions and images and snatches of overheard dialogue to use in my writing. When each notebook is full I transfer the best of them to a folder called Nuggets. My Nuggets folder must be full of subliminal clues to my underlying yearnings.  I jump out of bed and fire my laptop up.

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[i] Marion Milner, An Experiment in Leisure (London: Virago Press, 1986), pp. 199-200.

[ii] Milner, An Experiment, p. 13.

Cultivating Yearning

I decide to demote my rational left-brain, and stop acting according to what I think I ought to do. Instead, I’m going to allow myself to be moved to act. I will take instruction viscerally, from the cells of my body rather than the neurones in my head. I will pause, close my eyes, dig deep and feel the way forward. Yearning will be my guide.

When I stretch in a yoga pose, I try to pay attention to the signals that the muscles in my arms are giving me, rather than the directions of my brain – which is urging me (as ever) to ‘go further; try harder’. I try to carry this awareness beyond the yoga mat. I start to slow down, to pay attention to what’s unfolding internally – not externally.

While tightening a screw, I slow down, alert to how tight feels tight enough – and am able to hold back, resisting the impulse to screw it home as tight as possible. When I pour a glass of wine, instead of watching the meniscus rise up the side of the glass, I notice how it feels to pour, and stop when pouring feels complete. It turns out my hand knows how long it takes to fill a glass, even if my head doesn’t.

When I’m shopping for food, I stop planning the week’s recipes beforehand. I go into the supermarket with an open mind and choose whatever fruit and vegetables I feel a yearning for. Even if this sometimes means I don’t have all the ingredients necessary to make a certain dish, I have discovered that – if broccoli is what I fancy – then, eating broccoli, steamed, with salt and lemon and a small side of plain rice with butter (because it’s all I have in the cupboard) becomes an exercise in mindful eating. And because broccoli is what my body wants right now, it’s sublime.

I no longer choose what to wear the previous night – even though it would save me time in the morning. I wait until morning and look outside. Then I look inside myself and try to ascertain what I feel like wearing today. Do I feel the need to disappear? To be remote, calm, watchful, in black? Or to be vivacious in colour? Do I want to make a spectacle of myself in heels, or tread softly past, in flat shoes?

When I’m shopping for clothes I no longer leave the house with a template in my head of the sort of top I need buy to match my other outfits (then end up buying something close, that I do not love and never wear). Instead, I allow myself to be drawn to what presents itself, and I choose something because I love it, rather than because it ticks boxes.

Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between what the head and the heart is saying. So I stand by an item of clothing, with eyes half closed, divining it rather than assessing it. I stop looking at it with a narrow attention, assessing the fabric, the buttons, the cut, the purpose. I become attentive to my inner energy. Does this garment make me feel uplifted? Or does it give me a much duller, more resigned sense of accomplishment?

I make fewer mistakes when I pay attention to my yearning, and choose only what makes me feel more alive.

Creative Yearning

It was yearning for the faded grandeur of the Victorian seaside hotels of my hometown, that made me want to create The Grand Hotel in The Fish in Room 11. Then, one by one, other unconscious yearnings presented themselves, like symbols in a dream: attics, skylights, yellow pyjamas with ships on them, cream cakes, broken umbrellas, slate rooftops shining in the rain, the sea wind, the stillness of an upstairs bedroom with the curtains drawn in daytime…. Gradually, the book realized its entelechy.

It occurs to me that – in addition to mistakes, accidents and humour – there might be another way to enable de Bono’s creative pattern-switching in the brain: yearning, that gentle tug that draws us towards our entelechy. But in order to feel yearning, we need to feel wonder. And in order to feel wonder, we need to notice things. And we need to be responsive how we feel about the things we notice.

Osho was right. Not thinking isn’t enough. We also need to feel. Feeling is the way to tune into our yearning and tap into the bottom-up intelligence that guides us towards self-actualization – and creative action.

Unfortunately, I’ve come to believe emotions to be, at best, capricious, and at worst destructive forces that indicate a failure of self-control. I’ve repressed them for so long that I’m not even sure I’m having them, most of the time.

I had better start paying attention.  

Yearning

I know an abstract painter who doesn’t know what she’s going to paint before she begins; she only knows the colours and brushes she wants to use. She’ll ‘play around’ until some combination of colours appears that she can ‘have a conversation with’. Then she follows the conversation to see where it leads. “The first thing you have to do,” she says, “is stop. Then, you have to feel with your heart where you need to go next. You need to be playful, you need to be brave, and you need to take risks. And you mustn’t be afraid to make mistakes.”

But being aware of our inner responses isn’t always easy. We’re taught to control and suppress our feelings. Of course, we mustn’t react to each emotion that arises, but when we continue to deny our inner experiences we come desensitised. We become like leprosy victims, whose amputations are the result of damage they sustain because they can’t feel pain.

Without an awareness of our emotional responses to things, we lose our way, because we can no longer hear the quiet yearning that guides us towards what feeds us.

Yearning, says Booth, is the energy that drives the work of art. Yearning is a ‘fundamentally human instinct for more’ that might include ‘more satisfaction, more understanding of unknown things, an enhanced feeling of being alive, better answers to better questions’.[i] Biology would call these forces tropisms. Unlike ego-driven cravings and desires, yearnings are inbuilt, natural forces like those that make plants grow towards the sun, or birds want to build nests. They are, says Booth (quoting Dylan Thomas) ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.

This is the third time in the last three weeks I’ve come across that phrase: ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. It sounds suspiciously similar to the ‘agency’ that the scientist Daniel Dennett says exists at every level above the level of the atom. It also sounds suspiciously like the ‘energy behind the world of appearances’ that Csikszentmihalyi refers to in Flow.

Yearning, says Booth is ‘the engine that urges us toward our entelechy’. Entelechy is not a word I’ve heard before. Booth says that ‘entelechy’ derives from the Greek word meaning ‘to have the goal’ or ‘to embody the perfection.’ Yearning, then, is the feeling we must follow in order to bring about our inherent potential.

With a ‘whumph!’ like a gas boiler igniting, a small flame has appeared somewhere in the region of my solar plexus. And I know what it is: it’s yearning. It’s an excited, unfulfilled, expectant not-quite-longing for something ineffable. It’s what I felt when I first stood before the children’s literature reference shelves in the basement of Vancouver Public Library. It’s what I feel whenever I enter a secondhand bookshop. It’s what I felt for Narnia and Neverland – it was almost painful. Yearning is the silent silver bugle that calls us home.

So, Booth’s book is not about how to make soft furnishings, after all. It’s a call to arms. It’s a plea that we should stay open, stay alert to what we notice inside and out in order to follow our yearning. And here’s why it’s worth bothering: ‘When your life-action is attuned to your yearnings,’ says Booth, ‘what you notice weaves into a pattern.’

I go and look out of the window. A pair of crows are perched side by side in the bare branches of the elm across the road. The evidence that yearning leads us towards our entelechy is all around us. What is evolution – what am I? – if not the product of an infinite succession of responsive gestures driven by yearning?

Restoring a Sense of Wonder

The way to restore our capacity for wonder, says Booth, in The Everyday Work of Art, is by enhancing our ‘response-ability’. By ‘response-ability’, he means being alert to our own responses to things, whatever those responses might be.

‘In workshops,’ says Booth, ‘I am always struck by how hard it is for participants, of all ages, in all fields, to notice they are indeed having experiences. They do the activities, do them well, and have fine insights, but they resist considering what happens inside them during the experience as if it were important, worth noticing. Many have an ingrained bias that dismisses those inner events as inconsequential because they are intangible.’

I’m like those people in Booth’s workshops. I think instead of feel.

I was taken to an artist’s studio once, by a friend. There were six of us. The other five were artists. While they were flicking through a portfolio of abstract prints, I stood behind them, watching. The prints all looked the same to me, like rag-rolled wallpaper samples in blues and greens. The artists made polite noises as each page turned. I remained silent. But then, as the next page turned, the artists simultaneously cried out. I was startled. I couldn’t see anything different about this particular print. And yet, their reactions had been spontaneous.

I leaned closer to see if I, too, could see what they’d seen. But the page turned before I had chance. I knew they’d recognized something that, collectively, they had felt harmonious or good. And although I was seeing the same thing they were, I couldn’t feel what they could feel. This worried me. My failure didn’t feel like a deficiency of knowledge, but a deficiency of emotional or aesthetic sensibility – and I wasn’t sure that this sort of responsiveness could be learned.

Being responsive is hard work. It requires us to pay attention outside and inside, and to remain impartial while we do so. Our response-ability, says Booth, is to set aside our assumptions and our prejudices and genuinely perceive what we encounter. Genuine perception, says Booth, ‘requires a discipline to attend moment-to-moment without zooming off into the past or future and a capacity to read those moment-to-moment experiences for what they actually contain, in increasing complexity.’ This takes courage because it requires us to acknowledge all our responses, not just the pleasant ones. 

But it’s worth it. As workshop participants are prompted to start noticing their experience,’ says Booth, ‘their awareness flashes in fragile and ephemeral glimpses. Slowly, participants get a sense that those inner events are full of important, surprising information and accomplishments. […] They come to respect experience-awareness as a skill that directly taps the feeling of being alive.’

It’s this responsiveness that guides us in creating our work, and our lives.

Wonder

I can’t remember ordering The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life by Eric Booth. But I quite like the feeling that this book has turned up on my doorstep like an unexpected gift from my previous self.

I’m musing on this as I tear off the plastic wrapping and stuff it into the recycling. Then my heart sinks. The Everyday Work of Art is a big, softback coffee-table book with Van Gogh’s Room on the cover. It looks like it might be a book about arts and crafts. What did I buy this book for?

Then I open the cover and find six pages of superlative reviews before the copyright page. Among the names I recognize Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, and Madeline l’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time – one of my childhood heroes. Hmm. I open the book at random.

‘Wonder’, says Booth, ‘is the emotional response to the world that provides the impulse that launches the work of art.’

Wonder! Wonder is wonderful. Wonder makes us look closely. We don’t label and dismiss the things that make us wonder. We hold them up to the light, to see how their facets glint. Wonder opens us to new things, experiences and ideas, and expands our known world so that we have more ‘things’ with which to make connections. Children wonder about everything, don’t they? But as the world becomes familiar, we lose our capacity to marvel. No wonder our ability to be creative diminishes.

With a chill, I recall a quote by Somerset Maugham: ‘The danger that lies in wait for a writer is the death of enthusiasm, interest in life and people; the realization that people’s activities are trivial.’

Can a sense of wonder be restored?

I close The Everyday Work of Art and lay my hands upon the cover. I’m like a patient whose diagnosis can be found within this book, but I’m afraid to read on only to discover there’s no cure.

Noticing What You Notice

I buy a pocket notebook and start collecting descriptions, snatches of dialogue, moments – to enrich my writing, later:

Broken umbrella lying in the gutter like a bat’s wing.

Gulls lifted up against the sky.

But my noticing is enriching me. The more I look, the more I see; it’s like when you’re looking to move, you start noticing FOR RENT signs everywhere. Or like when your lover has a blue Mondeo, and you start seeing them everywhere. Noticing begets noticing.

Diane is a herbalist. On a walk she’ll point out tiny flowers growing in the hedgerow, or berries on a tree. The way she touches the delicate fronds or runs her fingertips along the bough of a tree, gives me a new appreciation of their complexity and beauty. Jill is a potter. She makes porcelain bowls with leaves and landscapes etched in black. Once, in winter, we were walking through an avenue of trees, their branches skeletal against a pale sky. “I love this time of year,” said Jill. “It’s the only time you get to see the shapes of the trees.”

I looked at the trees anew. I’d always thought winter trees looked bleak. But now, through her eyes, they looked elegant and structural. The bare twigs recalled the black ink lines on her white pots.

It’s nice to be with a noticer: they open your eyes to new ways of seeing. But it’s not so nice to be with someone who wants to direct your attention all the time. We need to be alert to our own responses to things. Why? These are the symbols that reflect our inner yearning and reveal deeper truths.

For example: you might have the urge to describe the box of buttons that you used to play with for hours as a child while your mother was working late. You don’t have to know that the piece you are going to write is about loneliness. You just have to describe the box of buttons – get right inside it and see where your thoughts wander. Perhaps it will be in writing this story that you will first realize that you’ve always felt lonely. Maybe only now will you realize that this feeling has affected all the decisions you have ever made. And when you look back at your initial image – that box of odd buttons, each one lost, alone, waiting for a garment to belong to – you might marvel at the wisdom of your unconscious in choosing the perfect symbol to portray your loneliness. But you don’t have to know this in advance. To begin with, all you need to concern yourself with is the box of buttons.

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off – they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

–William Stafford

Beauty

I start trying to reconnect with my body. I lie on my back on the carpet in my front room, doing a guided body scan. Afterwards, my tongue feels soft the way it does after I’ve woken from a nap, as though the pH in my mouth has altered. I also notice that I feel more comfortable in my skin. Usually, at the end of the day I tend to crave a shower because I want to wash away the day. But curiously, after doing the body scan, I no longer crave a shower. The body scan has already washed the day away.

I try to engage my physical senses in other ways, too. I do the raisin exercise and rediscover just how sticky raisins are. For homework I am tasked with showering mindfully, brushing our teeth mindfully, and eating a meal mindfully. I’m always in such a rush I feel that I will never manage to do all these things mindfully on a daily basis. But when I do eat some pasta mindfully – chewing slowly, thinking about the food’s provenance – while looking out the window across the rainy slate rooftops, I swear I can taste winds crossing fields of wheat.

I do some yoga poses in the front room, in the bay window. Afterwards, I stand still for a moment, feeling no compulsion to move just yet. My gaze falls upon my linen chest. The wood is old and battered and the grain is scored with gashes – but this morning, I notice the way the sunlight strikes the side of the trunk so that the grain glows amber, almost orange. The dead wood, once the flesh of a living tree, seems to live again.

I don’t know whether it’s the slowing down, or the increased blood flow to my brain, but after doing yoga the colours seem brighter. I’m noticing more beauty elsewhere, too. I stop to admire the intricacy of a desiccated thistle. On the beach I notice how the light comes turquoise through the water as each wave crests, and for the first time I hear how the shingle rattles as each wave retreats.

One day, I’m in my parents’ garden, painting my nails on the flagged edge of their pond. My egoic self is thinking about how my toes will be admired when I wear my sandals the following day to meet Julie. They will be beautiful.

And then, suddenly, I see myself dead in the mortuary with my nails still looking lovely.

It’s entirely possible that the future I imagine will be imaginary. And just like that, I am back in the present, thinking, “this is all I actually have: the glossy green lily pads on the pond, the breeze in the bushes, the sun on my skin, and the smell of the varnish.” And I think, “this is the beautiful moment. This is it, right here, right now.”

The ability to remain present and avoid being carried off by the relentless chatter of the egoic self isn’t something that we only practice on the meditation cushion. Sitting on the cushion simply allows us to fully appreciate – for the first time and without distractions – how little time we spend here, and how beautiful it is.

External Attention

But then Milner discovers that she can even place her awareness outside of her body altogether. Not only can she leave the cerebral top of her ‘tower’ and descend into her body, she can leave the tower altogether and make herself part of what is happening outside. [i]

Milner describes doing this at a concert. She is determined to make the most of the experience and tries to concentrate on the music by attending to it directly. But she can only sustain her focussed attention for moments before her mind begins to wander. Milner tries moving her attention into the soles of her feet. Then she tries ‘throwing’ herself out towards the orchestra and imagines herself standing next to the musicians. In this way, she is able to ‘feel’ the music and enjoy it more fully.[ii]

I look up from reading and try throwing my awareness across the room, without success. But I think I know what Milner means. Once, driving back through mid-Wales after spending the night with my boyfriend, the wet fields and the sodden forests felt beautiful to me. My heart was wide open. I loved the dripping trees the slick wet stumps, the snowdrops in the sodden verge. I wanted to roll in the wet grass of the muddy, threadbare field and felt sad that my conditioning would not allow me. Maybe, like Milner, I could put my mind there, instead.

I place A Life of One’s Own face down on the table and look out of the kitchen window towards the scrubby little hill opposite. But I try not to use my eyes or my mind to look. I look with my chest. I open my chest and, literally, my heart goes out to it. I’m feeling the landscape, but not with my fingertips, with my chest.

The hillside is like one of those landscaped train sets, where you can dip bits of sponge in green paint to represent the trees and bushes, and you paint sandpaper to resemble grass. I feel big enough to stoop down over the hill and press myself upon it, to feel the rough scrub, the heather and the gorse, the damp coolness of the grassy knoll with the unyielding rocky outcrops near the top. I move my attention up, across the hill towards the oak woodland and when I’m close enough I can hear the way the autumnal leaves will rustle dryly as the wind moves through them. I can almost put out a huge hand and cup the oak canopies with my palm. In fact, I’m large enough to embrace the whole hill, to lay my cheek against its turf slopes. And if I try brushing my hand over the long grass of the field, I can feel the aspiration of each individual seed head, standing upright. 

Like Milner, I can’t believe I’ve never learned about these different ways of placing awareness. I remember as a child testing the extent of my peripheral vision, but I have never given it a thought since. I have never been encouraged to pay any attention to my body – and certainly not outside my body. Everything I’ve come to think of as my ‘education’ has been set upon establishing superhighways in my head. As a result, I have become blinkered, rushing ever faster along the narrow tracks that I’ve been guided down.

But Milner’s mindfulness techniques seem designed to do the opposite. They force me to stop, take my blinkers off and look around. They encourage me to be alert, receptive to I-don’t-yet-know-what. And when my mind is open and aware like this, I realize that the superhighways in my head don’t really exist at all. They’re literally figments of my imagination. The instant I stop travelling along them, they disappear.

Physical Attention

In A Life of One’s Own, Milner explores her powers of perception further. She finds that she can focus her attention not just wide and narrow, but also into different areas of her body. ‘My ordinary way of looking at things,’ she says, ‘seemed to be from my head, as if it were a tower in which I kept myself shut up, only looking out of the windows to watch what was going on.’[i] But now, Milner realizes that she can move the focus of her awareness down into her chest, or into the soles of her feet at will.

‘Once,’ says Milner, ‘on a night journey in a train when I could not sleep for the crowd of day impressions which raced through my head, I happened to ‘feel myself’ down into my heart and immediately my mind was so stilled that in a few moments I fell into peaceful sleep. But it surprised me to think that I had lived for twenty-five years without ever discovering that such an internal placing of awareness was possible.’[ii]

‘Experiencing the present with the whole of my body,’ says Milner, ‘instead of with the pin-point of my intellect led to all sorts of new knowledge and new contentment. I began to guess what it might mean to live from the heart instead of the head, and I began to feel movements of the heart which told me more surely what I wanted than any making of lists.’[iii]

My heart starts thumping, too, as I read this line. I too rely on lists. I too want to live by the wisdom of my heart. Is this how it’s done? Does placing our attention in the body allows us to reconnect with the wisdom of our guts? Might it be the secret to being able to feel the way forward, both in my book and in my life?

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[i] Milner, A Life, p. 71.