Lockdown and Liberation: why I self-isolate myself

I’ve barely been outside in days, but for a brief chat to a neighbour I’ve had virtually no human contact. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, in a kind of timeless stasis. Physically confined to a space the size of a large living room. Alone, with the mind.

This is not the last week, this is mid-February. The wind, deafening, the rain, ceaseless. In a nondescript valley in North Wales, on a bleak, windy hillside a small cottage sits, nestled just in the lee of the ferocious wind. So well hidden that when I arrive I struggle to find it, wandering lost in the darknesses I feel intensely vulnerable. Even inside such a place feels precarious, just about warm enough to be comfortable when the stove’s really going. For six days I live a life stripped back, no internet, no food after midday, no distraction. The weather is such that I take few walks outside, this is not why I am here. Instead I meditate…

Sitting, walking, sitting, walking, sitting, walking

I wake at 5:00 but otherwise I take no notice of time passing. I know I sit for longer than I have ever sat before. Continual stillness, I see no reason to stop.

I have self-isolated to a degree beyond anything any government would ask of its citizens. Why have I voluntary done something which appears to have generated a wave of existential dread in the general population? Something which it’s feared will be of great harm to our mental health. I cannot answer that question. Not because I don’t have an answer, I do, but whenever I try to communicate it I fail completely. I talk an alien language.

So what can I offer to those anxious, fearful, depressed over the prospect of indefinite isolation. Maybe nothing. I cannot offer help to those looking after children, I have none. I cannot offer help to those with worries about their income, mine is secure. I cannot offer help to those worried about the health and safety of loved ones, no one really can.

I can offer nothing, and in that nothing is for me everything. I do not expect you to agree but maybe, you can come to appreciate something of that nothing. You see we have to live with the mind our whole lives. We have no choice. Our minds crave activity, certainty, they grasp at this delusion but uncertainty is our true way of being. Such events as this amplify what is a fundamental truth, life from one moment to the next is uncertain. We can try and distract ourselves from this truth; watch tv, clean, throw ourselves into a home improvement project but the mind will return and uncertainty will wait, it’s patience everlasting. As Blaine Pascal notes in the 17th century as today:

“Nothing is so unbearable to a man (or woman!) as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his falseness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness…”

But, to loose any semblance of control, to accept and embrace this nothing. Because the nothing is already here, buried under the incessant mental chatter of our everyday lives. But to encourage it, to just sit, with a cup of tea, and the mind. The mind will hate it, years of neural programming is screaming to do something, to worry, to plan, to solve some problem, to judge others, to judge yourself, to find fault in anything and everything. Oh how life would be better if….

…I am not saying this is easy, far from it. The seas of the mind lie choppy at the best of times and now we are seeing with increasingly clarity the darkness of the oncoming storm, but calm is possible. The heady calm of a lake on a windless day, a palpable stillness. To just sit, to accept this is the way it is, to be happy with that emptiness. Maybe even to find joy in a life removed of clutter, a life slowed down, simplified but made whole. Alone, but content, with nothing.