Mind Moves:Like many of you, I have come to a point in the year where my soul needs a break.
The options to find rest are many, but I have chosen to use one week of my annual leave to be alone in solitude. I have availed of a friend's kind offer to use his cabin in a forest in Kentucky, far from everything that constitutes my familiar world.
Solitude can be a challenge when you've been living busily with others and dealing with all manner of crises that keep you gloriously distracted. Settling into solitude does not happen automatically in my experience. As I sit here I am aware of a silence that envelops this place, something that makes me uneasy. Not depressed, lonely or fearful, but uneasy.
Simple realisations come vividly into my awareness as I rest into this silence: an e-mail to which I never responded, a bill I haven't yet paid, a birthday I forgot. But the more painful realisations have to do with the numerous ways my lived life falls short of the values and ideals I claim to hold dear.
Solitude magnifies everything. It brings an uncomfortable awareness of all the loose ends and contradictions in your life that you might prefer to forget, suppress and ignore. It reminds you that "You can run, but you can't hide."
Who needs this when you're on vacation? To heck with this silence; where's the remote? How about another coffee; what about a brisk walk in the woods?
Distraction buys you time, but isn't that how we spend most of our lives? Could it be that distraction is the very reason we end up feeling so exhausted and ill at ease with ourselves? What we run from by day simply becomes the raw material for dreams that wake us in the night.
Surely there is a more satisfactory way to be on vacation that doesn't embroil us in self-centred rumination or frenzied distraction.
Solitude pierces that protective shell we draw around ourselves and call reality. As time passes I notice how much I live inside my head - how much I want to control everything by setting conditions and rules to ensure this is time well spent.
There is something absurd in my compulsion to shape this experience so that it proves to be productive. It misses the whole point of simply being here in this beautiful place and opening myself to what this experience might awaken in me, if I just get out of the way and let it work its magic.
But how am I to break free of my constricted imagination? How am I to unfreeze parts of my personality that seem to want to block out anything that seems unfamiliar or threatening? How am I to unlock my energies so that they can revel in the unstructured experience of simply "being" rather than "doing"? How can I free myself of the delusions I create about reality when I am so out of tune with it?
Freedom began for me when I accepted the absurdity of my position and stopped caring so much about it. Sanity is saved by a sense of humour. I stepped away from my compulsive mind and began to pay attention to what was right in front of my nose.
I listened to my exhausted body and allowed it the sleep it sorely needed. After two days of blissful coma, I began to notice the beauty around me, not as some backdrop for the inner neurotic dramas, but as something extraordinary in its own right that invited my attention and appreciation.
I noticed the chorus of birdsong, strikingly different from what I'm used to back home; a turkey buzzard that landed awkwardly on a tree branch not far away and eyed this intruder from a safe distance. A swallow that made a magnificent nose-dive from the rafters overhead before pulling itself up and setting a flight path through the trees. A wild deer that strolled into view with a young fawn beside her. And the fireflies that glowed in pitch blackness, creating a ballet of light that was awesome.
There is a silence at the heart of all our lives where we can rest and recover from the wounds of sound and the tyranny of our super-egos. We can lose sight of this silence, even though it is always there, waiting, at the frontier of our awareness. It never pressures us to stop what we're doing, to change who we are. It simply bears witness to whatever we are doing and to what we dream of doing. If we take time to relax and tune into it, it can liberate us.
Tony Bates is founder director of Headstrong, The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie).