Wilderness memories are ballast in my life but, to find peace in the human world, something more is needed. Peace comes from knowing what you want out of life, paring down, simplifying, focusing on a few important things. Do works of beauty. Serve something bigger than yourself. Pour yourself into satisfying work. Then, deep relaxation. Make an art form of deep relaxation.
Nurture your friendship with yourself, with your inner world. Minimize the extraneous. Minimize the number of moving parts. Be careful of who and what you let into your life. Protect your time. Do creative work. Be gentle on yourself. Make room for love in your life. Build close friendships with good people. Read. Think. Spend time alone.
"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone."
- James Baldwin
A peaceful life requires a center point, a place of balance. Everything unique and beautiful grows out of the still point, that place of quiet reflection, meditation or prayer.
No matter how extreme my experiments and adventures, everything is fine in my life if I make sacred room for a quiet center. It needs to be nurtured, paid attention to. If I do that, it will guide me through troubled waters. When I lose touch with it, my life spins out of control. To nurture a quiet center, we sometimes need to be hard on ourselves, hard on our attraction to trivial and insignificant things.
Whenever I’ve been alone for more than twenty-four hours, my mind has become preoccupied with my screw-ups, my embarrassments, the things I should have done differently. There are a lot of those things. I’ve bounced up against boundaries all my life. But others have told me that they experience the same. After three days, a deep peace takes over, but in the interim, I encounter anger towards myself and others — others in the broadest sense, including the systems of power in human world. My mind, operating in a vacuum, is simply looking for something to do, something to focus on. After three days, I’m fine. I’m free.
The human mind solves problems. That’s what it wants to do because that’s what it is good at. It is all about the world out there; it is uncomfortable turning inward. It doesn’t want to be alone with itself in a room or a forest. It wants activity, controversy. Conflict excites it. It is constantly searching for something to worry about, something to fear, something to get excited about. It likes human relationships. It craves distraction from the truths at the center of our lives.
Nothing is more controversial, nothing more avoided, nothing more threatening to our self-constructed narrative, than the truth. We certainly don’t want to be alone in a room or a forest with truth for any length of time.
But art and writing and all creativity, including creating a full, deep experience of life require a relationship with that quiet center. There’s always something more important to do. The house needs cleaning. Bills need to be paid. There’s a great show on television. No, no, sit there alone in a room. Confront that scary silence, that aloneness. Make friends with it. Your creative work requires that.Everything beautiful grows out of that.
Roderick W. MacIver
