Small Pleasures Page 3

  Every day, the sky is perfectly blue and unclouded. From your hotel balcony, you look out onto an arid, scrubby hill; you love the sight of the baked and cracked earth because it speaks of week after week of hot, dry weather. For months – practically for your whole life, it feels – you have been craving sunshine.

  In the north, the environment doesn’t feel benign. It can’t be trusted. You are always fending off something: the wind, the rain, the cold. Through the impossibly long winter and wintry spring, you have been swaddling yourself in layers of garments. You hardly ever see your own legs – beyond a reluctant glance at their pasty paleness in the bath. You seriously wonder if anyone could find your body attractive these days. You eat for comfort. You’re always wanting scones or pies or big helpings of apple crumble. And it shows – somewhere under the habitual jumpers and coats.

  But deep within you, you feel as if you are a creature essentially made for sunny mornings, hot, lazy afternoons and warm nights. That’s where you, Homo sapiens, were designed to live. But by ingenious, effortful and it seems rather fateful manoeuvres, we humans have managed to sustain ourselves in fundamentally alien places that are reliably windswept, wet, icy and dreary for most of the year and only fitfully, capriciously anything else. We’ve made good lives for ourselves up there – in Wiesbaden, Trondheim, Hyvinkää and Calgary. But at a cost.

  Sunshine isn’t merely ‘nice’. It has a profound role in our lives. It is an agent of moral qualities: of generosity, courage, the appreciation of the present moment, confidence … When the world seems bountiful, material accumulation looks less impressive. When there is easy living, competition loses its edge. When it is so hot, there is no point trying to read – or even think too much. One is merely in the present.

  These are corrective attitudes. Too much of them and they turn against themselves. If the ways of the north are too dominant and entrenched in your life, you need the virtues of the south. You have come to lie on the beach at Pefkos not because you are light-minded or indolent. But precisely because you have become – by habit – so dutiful, serious, hard-working, disconnected from your body, over-cerebral and cautious.

  It is a deeply noble search for wisdom and balance (which are the ideal goals of art and civilisation) that has led you here – to the world of sun cream, dark glasses, recliners and vividly coloured cocktails by the pool.

  9

  The Desert

  You are – quite literally – in the middle of nowhere – and, unexpectedly, it’s helping. A lot. How frantic we otherwise normally are. We live competitive crazed lives: we compare ourselves constantly to those who have more, are smarter, seem more organised, look younger …

  There are so many reasons to be frantic, and yet – as we know in our hearts – it is even more of a priority to keep an occasional appointment with someone we neglect in our normal madness: a deeper, quieter part of ourselves. We have intimations of it at night, on the motorway or in the grey stillness of the early morning. And we feel it strongly here, deep in Navajo land, on the Utah–Arizona border.

  It seems everything we do matters so much, but, here, we listen to a different, more humbling message: that everything we do and are is in truth meaningless – when considered from a sufficient distance, from the perspective of the timeless stones, the boundless vistas, the infinite heavens.

  To counter our tendencies to exaggerate and panic, we need only meditate on our utter insignificance when measured against aeons of time and space. It was 200 million years ago that the Triassic seas retreated and the land rose up to become a high desert plateau that wind and rain have slowly, ever so slowly eroded. Harder capstones gradually emerged, protecting the rock below, to form the slender pinnacles, or buttes, and wider mesas of Monument Valley.

  It is baking hot here during the day. The air is thin. It is a place resolutely indifferent to our lives. Here one does not matter; it is obvious – in a quiet, not-unkind way – that one’s life is a tiny thing. The desert provides a needed, strategic renewal of perspective.

  Beyond the dramatic pillars of rock, the empty, very slightly undulating table extends into infinity without any mark of mankind. A light haze builds at the horizon. Banks of distant cloud are touched with pink and gold as the sun starts to go down, the horizontal rays of the sun setting the upright bands of sandstone alight. The ego is loosened, forgets itself.

  The desert rehearses in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are; that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept the limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. This is the lesson written into the stones and the red sands. But so grandly is it written here that we can come away from the desert, not crushed, but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities.

  We have not only travelled to a place, we have heard the whispers, across an ochre wasteland, of a philosophy of wisdom.

  10

  Finding Your Feet Abroad

  On the first day, it was difficult. You went into the corner shop just off the main Motomachi shopping street to buy a prepaid mobile card. You pointed at your phone; you pretended to make a call. It was useless. Mr Nishimura couldn’t understand you at all. You were hot and flustered (it was 86 degrees Fahrenheit and pretty humid). You felt such an idiot.

  It was eerily familiar: like the time at school you were supposed to make a speech and your mind went totally blank; the painful evenings at college when everybody else seemed to be heading off somewhere and you weren’t sure if you could ask to join in.

  Over the years, at home, you have learned how to avoid many of the situations that you find so awkward (though other people appear to manage them without the slightest concern). Most of the time, you can work round the diffidence and fear of being the unwelcome focus of attention, what at certain moments you call your shyness. When something feels alien or in any way threatening, your instinct is to retreat. You’d never ask a stranger for directions in the street; the idea of going up to a group of people you don’t know at a party is terrifying. But now you are beginning to tire of the downside of this survival tactic: the too high price it extracts.

  In Japan, everything is, to you, foreign. You of course can’t know what you are supposed to do. You are so far from being inconspicuous, it’s a joke. Shyness is in a way no longer even an option. You are already so far off the deep end.

  So you go back to the shop. You make use of the ATM (which has an English language option). You buy some wasabi-flavoured crisps and give the man a big smile. He grins back. You’re learning to be a little more confident. You are learning how to do something: you’re learning to overcome, not just work round, your shyness. A holiday that immerses you in a life entirely different to your normal routine is the ideal setting to exercise what is really a skill (though we tend to see it as a piece of good or bad luck). You didn’t book into a big chain hotel. You’ve rented an apartment near the wonderful Sankeien Gardens from a really nice guy called Kazutaka.

  Today you bought a packet of Chokobi mini star-shaped chocolate biscuits. You made a joke about the rain. You said ‘ame desu’ – which you’d practised after breakfast and hopefully means something like ‘it’s raining’ – and gestured drolly at your wet hair. Mr Nishimura beamed at you. It’s a deep corrective. The people in your life who have been hard to please do not represent normality.

  A small pleasure – as little as smiling across a linguistic gulf – is often really a satisfaction in glimpsing a great and useful truth manifest in an eloquent detail. The movement of the facial muscles of the shopkeeper are a tiny, welcome, announcement of a profound fact: there is a vast quantity of goodwill circulating in the world just below the surface and which we usually delve into too rarely. But now perhaps we can more often. We can take this growth in confidence with us when we go back home. There is less to fear.

  11

  Being Up Late at N
ight

  It’s very late; more conventional people have long ago turned in, but we have stayed up, to read, to think, to talk with a long-forgotten person: ourselves. Late at night is when big things may at last have a chance to happen in the mind.

  Night is a corrective to the demands of the community. I may be a dentist or a maths teacher but, long before that happened and still now when I am allowed to commune with myself, I am simply a nameless, limitless consciousness, a far more expansive, un-anchored figure, of infinite possibilities and rare, disturbing, ambivalent, peculiar, visionary insights.

  The thoughts of night would sound weird to my mother, my friend, my boss, my child. These people need us to be a certain way. They cannot tolerate all our possibilities and for some good reasons. We don’t want to let them down; they have a right to benefit from our predictability. But their expectations shape us, make us who we are, and choke off important aspects.

  However, at night, with the window open and a clear sky above, it is just us and the universe – and for a time, we can take on a little of its boundlessness.

  12

  The Charm of Cows

  – It’s weird they exist at all.

  – You can’t tell what a cow is thinking, though it’s definitely thinking something.

  – Cows look great in fields.

  – They are easy-going: a clump of grass, a bale of hay make them happy; they don’t mind standing in the drizzle.

  – Cows are not selfish.

  – If you look at a cow for five minutes, a tiny part of its tranquil soul takes root in you.

  – Their ears were designed by a comic genius.

  – Apart from that, they carefully protect their dignity.

  – Cows are slightly bigger than you think.

  – Cows have never rebelled. They harbour no bitterness. They are expert at waiting.

  – A cow does not judge you: you are what you are, to a cow.

  – Cows don’t fidget.

  – They appear to be shy.

  – By chance, many people drink their breast milk.

  – They have no faith in politics.

  – Cows do not suffer from status anxiety.

  – Cows are not interested in what you think of them.

  – Cows do not dwell on their troubles.

  – Nothing you do will ever amuse or impress a cow.

  – Cows are very focused on now.

  – Looking at cows can make your day.

  13

  Up at Dawn

  It’s 5.45 am on a summer’s morning. You’ve woken early. It’s still outside. The sun hasn’t quite risen yet. Normally, you’d be sleeping right through this. You’re reconnecting with your life. Somewhere, a solitary lorry rumbles away. The forecast says it’s going to be hot later. All the real brightness and warmth is still beyond the horizon. But it’s on its way. It’s started to turn the lower clouds orange and make the sky, in that direction, pink and pale purple. The bottom clouds look like they are floating in a golden sea. If you haven’t seen it for a while, you forget how impressive it looks. Every single morning some version of this happens, though you are almost always asleep when it does.

  In the kitchen, there are a few last remains of yesterday. The argument you had last night feels far away. Why did it matter? Dawn is the world’s reminder to let yesterday go. When everyone else is asleep, the house feels like it is just yours. You can remember why you like it.

  Last night in here it was quite tense while you were cooking dinner. Your partner was giving you a hard time – at least you thought they were. No one else is going to be up for ages. You’ve got the place to yourself. It looks different at this hour. The magical square of early sunlight on the wall makes you think of childhood. You on Sunday mornings, when your parents had a lie-in; you’d sneak down and steal biscuits. It felt like going for an adventure – in your own home.

  You can hear the birds, now. Later, the human world will drown them out. Overnight, a snail has made a momentous journey from the windowsill to a potted geranium. At dawn you notice things that are missed in the rush of the day. There are parts of yourself that get missed too. More delicate, more wondering. You’ve been missing the version of yourself that you only meet at this time.

  You head out to pick up a few things from a local shop. The air feels blissfully fresh. And it’s quiet. The usual roar of traffic from the main road hasn’t started. There’s a brief flap of wings as a bird rises from a nearby tree. You can hear a clear, high-pitched bird call and another very different one, more hollow and warm. The details of the natural world so easily escape our notice.

  You see a tranquil beauty in the tower block you’ve always rather disliked up to now. You feel friendly towards a man with cropped grey hair who is noisily stacking shopping baskets and boxes of bananas outside the supermarket. There’s someone walking their dog. Like you – at least today – a voluntary early riser; they’ve chosen to be here. You don’t know anything else about them, except this one thing, which, at the moment, seems important. You almost say hello. Maybe another time you will. You stroll across the road – usually you have to wait for the lights and scurry over. You’ve got time to watch the clouds shed their pink tones and take on their normal smudged appearance. At this hour, it’s a little easier to think well of the world. The city looks serene and elegant. You feel calm and a little proud of yourself for being here now.

  You have a burst of energy for things you often don’t want to face. You map out the pros and cons of a career move on a big sheet of paper; you look through some old family photographs and send a long email to your mother; you pay a couple of annoying bills online and get them out of the way; you cook yourself a good breakfast of scrambled eggs.

  It’s strange: all available time is, in truth, limited. You can’t make there be 25 hours in the day. Yet now it does feel like you are in possession of an extra slice of existence; it’s always been there, but you’ve only just found it. Time could be rearranged: there are plenty of things that can contribute to leading a life more like the one we want. We could get new chances. Every day, it happens. And every day you have the chance to be again the person you are just now in the very early morning.

  14

  Staring out of the Window

  We tend to reproach ourselves for staring out of the window. We are supposed to be working, or studying, or ticking off things on our to-do list. It can seem almost the definition of wasted time. It seems to produce nothing, to serve no purpose. We equate it with boredom, distraction, futility. The act of cupping our chin in our hands near a pane of glass and letting our eyes drift in the middle distance does not normally enjoy high prestige. We don’t go around saying: ‘I had a great day: the high point was staring out of the window’. But maybe in a better society that’s just the sort of thing people would say to one another.

  The point of staring out of a window is, paradoxically, not to find out what is going on outside. It is, rather, an exercise in discovering the contents of our own minds. It’s easy to imagine we know what we think, what we feel and what’s going on in our heads. But we rarely do entirely. There’s a huge amount of what makes us who we are that circulates unexplored and unused. Its potential lies untapped. It is shy and doesn’t emerge under the pressure of direct questioning. If we do it right, staring out of the window offers a way for us to listen out for the quieter suggestions and perspectives of our deeper selves.

  Plato suggested a metaphor for the mind: our ideas are like birds fluttering around in the aviary of our brains. But in order for the birds to settle, Plato understood that we needed periods of purpose-free calm. Staring out of the window offers such an opportunity. We see the world going on: a patch of weeds is holding its own against the wind; a grey tower block looms through the drizzle. But we don’t need to respond; we have no overarching intentions, and so the more tentative parts of ourselves have a chance to be heard, like the sound of church bells in the city once the traffic has died down at night.<
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  The potential of daydreaming isn’t recognised by societies obsessed with productivity. But some of our greatest insights come when we stop trying to be purposeful and instead respect the creative potential of reverie. Window daydreaming is a little strategic rebellion against the excessive demands of immediate (but ultimately insignificant) pressures – in favour of the diffuse, but very serious, search for the wisdom of the unexplored deep self.

  Some pleasures – like that of looking out of a window and wondering about life – are so quiet that we easily miss them. We don’t quite detect them, even though they are really there – as one may fail to catch a whispered endearment in a noisy bar. But once properly alerted we can better direct our attention to something that turns out to be tender and lovely. Small pleasures are often of this kind. It is the task of culture to draw them to our notice, so that they can take up a larger, beneficial place in our lives.

  15

  A Hot Bath

  It is easy to get carried away imagining a happy life. One mentally sketches the perfect job, the ideal relationship, a wide set of fascinating yet always cheerful friends.

  It’s lovely to think about such things, but to get very attached to these hopes is unhelpful: life perhaps just won’t live up to them. One will be forever disappointed. Which is why there’s a wisdom that focuses on the reliable pleasures and satisfaction that lie within our grasp. A hot bath fits into this category.

  It’s best when the water is deep and, at first, almost too hot. You venture a foot, wince, and run a burst of cold. Slowly you lower yourself in. The water surges up round your sides as you go down, a little wave goes over the side – but you’ll live with that. You lie back and put a foot up by the taps, getting one knee into the warmth. Then you change legs.