A FEW YEARS BACK, I was suffering heartbreak so intense I lost my appetite for months, and barely slept. I was skeletal, scattered, shorn of confidence. I called my counsellor in tears and said, ‘I just don’t know how I am going to get through this.’ He told me that, when he was a young man, he had once said exactly the same thing to a wise mentor of his. This man, an Argentinian, abruptly slapped him and said, ‘It is now that everything that you have been given in your life matters; this is what you draw on. Your parents, your friends, your work, your books, everything you have ever been told, everything you have ever learned, this is when you use that.’ And he was right. What is the point of all you have learned if you can’t employ it when you are floundering in a nadir? Haven’t all those lessons, and loves, been pooled in a reservoir you can draw on?
Since then, I have come close to death several times. In hindsight, I often wonder why I let that old heartbreak send me into such orbital despair. Because in recent years, I have had three major, brutal surgeries — the most recent lasting for fifteen hours — to remove a beastly cancer that had spread across my abdomen. I experienced at these times a kind of clarity and intensity of emotion that I had never known before: fear, anxiety, calm, loneliness, utter dread, love, an otherworldly focus. In the vortex of cancer, all other sounds drown out, and you hear only the beating of your heart, the drawing of your own breath, the uncertainty of your footfalls. You may be surrounded by the hugest crowd of family and friends, and by the shiniest love, but you walk alone through these medical valleys of darkness.
I have yearned for an end to excruciating pain that no drugs can touch, been haunted by opioid nightmares, spent months in hospital wards, and lain on my back in a surgical gown as hot, poisonous chemicals of chemotherapy were poured into an open wound then swilled around. I have willed my body to work again after this venom paralysed my insides, stumbling step by step, and hobbling along corridors dragging a drip, trying to ensure my gown remained firmly fastened.
Of course, I am not the only one to have experienced this kind of trauma. We immediately understand each other, those of us who have staggered along the paths of serious sickness, but we also empathise more with other kinds of suffering — those millions of us with cracked hearts, battered bodies, blackened brains. We more readily commiserate with the times when life is like a boa constrictor wrapped around our windpipes, squeezing out breath; like a dark ogre stealing our joy, our purpose and our hope as we sleep; or sometimes just like a thick black airless cave with no apparent exit.
I have had to find that exit again, and again, and again. What has fascinated and sustained me over these last few years has been the notion that we have the ability to find, nurture and carry our own inner, living light — a light to ward off the darkness. This is not about burning brightly, but yielding simple phosphorescence — being luminous at temperatures below incandescence, quietly glowing without combusting. Staying alive, remaining upright, even when lashed by doubt.
In those particularly dark days, when my world imploded with loss and illness, and when I had to find and tap my own reserves, my search for what makes us phosphorescent took on a new urgency — and brought me immense beauty. In my quest for what Emily Dickinson called ‘the light within’, I learned these simple, powerful lessons.
First, pay attention.
Second, do not underestimate the soothing power of the ordinary.
Third, seek awe, and nature, daily.
Fourth . . . well, so many things: show kindness; practise grace; eschew vanity; be bold; embrace friends, family, faith and doubt, imperfection and mess; and live deliberately.
To my delight, I have found a burgeoning body of science that provides a substantial evidentiary basis for all these principles. These are no sure-fire panaceas, of course, and a number of these recommendations may seem blindingly obvious to some readers, but when you stare down death then return to life, such beliefs take on a new clarity and urgency: you do not, you cannot, waste a breath.
THIS IS WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT: my search for the ‘light within’, for what makes people shine. The findings I have gathered here are not definitive, or comprehensive, but they struck me powerfully and I wish I had understood them better when I was younger. Life is tempestuous and life is precious, and recognising that those two things are twinned is part of the secret of the truly phosphorescent.
PART I
Awe, Wonder and Silence
In the company of arsonists
One day recently, while swimming at sunrise, I began thinking about how Oscar Wilde described the dawn as like a ‘frightened girl’ who crept along the ‘long and silent street . . . with silver sandalled feet’. It suddenly struck me as so timid and British (although Wilde was an Irishman, he lived many years in London). In Australia, the dawn is an arsonist who pours petrol along the horizon, throws a match on it and watches it burn.
The sun’s rise and the sun’s retreat bookend our days with awe. We often take awe for granted, and yet it’s something both modern scientists and ancient philosophers have told us to hunt. Awe makes us stop and stare. Being awestruck dwarfs us, humbles us, makes us aware we are part of a universe unfathomably larger than ourselves; it even, social scientists say, makes us kinder and more aware of the needs of the community around us.
Wonder is a similar sensation, and the two feelings are often entwined. Wonder makes us stop and ask questions about the world, while marvelling over something we have not seen before, whether spectacular or mundane. The eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith — the man who became known as the ‘Father of Capitalism’ after writing his influential book on economics, The Wealth of Nations — put this perfectly. He thought wonder occurred ‘when something quite new and singular is presented . . . [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance . . . It stands alone and by itself in the imagination.’ Smith believed that sometimes we could physically feel this wonder: ‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’.
Great thinkers, philosophers and eccentrics have all been inspired by the unfathomable. ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience,’ wrote Albert Einstein, ‘is the mysterious; it is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.’
In my own quest to become phosphorescent — in which I lost myself many times in dark holes and swamps — it was awe and wonder that I kept returning to, and the quiet healing properties of nature: the forest, the sea and the creatures they contain. So many of us have our quiet places of escape and refuge — nearby beaches, a park bench, a magnificent tree.
A small mountain of studies in the field of nature science has repeatedly confirmed that the sheer sight of green — plants, leaves, trees, views from windows — can make us happier and healthier. This evidence and these experiences have given rise to the burgeoning Japanese-pioneered practice of forest bathing, or shinrin yoku, whereby participants are walked slowly through tracts of trees to touch them, listen to their sounds, and reconnect with nature.
All over the world, people increasingly want to understand how residents of an urbanised environment can tune out the cities, the traffic and the jackhammers and listen, once again, to the birds singing and the leaves whispering in the breeze. They want to settle the stirring, or restlessness, and remember who they are. Often, they seek silence, an increasingly valuable and rare commodity. Real silence is not about muffling all sounds, though, but about muffling all artificial, or human-made, sounds. As I learned on a visit to Arnhem Land, a connection to country is a fundamental part of the identity of our Indigenous people, and the call to quiet, to listen and to respect the world we live in is an ancient one. While so much of our self-exploration today is hash-tagged #wellness and displayed, it became obvious to me in the far reach of sacred lands, encircled by campfires and eucalypts, that sometimes the best way to pay attention to country is to keep your mouth shut, open your eyes and just listen.