That inner drive returned on the day she moved out of the shelter. She had settled her case and bought a new house with the proceeds; on the same day the $2000 advance for her book on jellyfish, Stung, was mailed to her refuge. She has never cashed it; she framed it and hung it in her new home.
The secret to ert, she told me later in an email, is different for everyone: ‘For me, it is a mix of someone or something to love (I’m lucky, I have two: jellyfish and my car!), a purpose (my research and writing), meaningful work (CSIRO), and self-care (my fabulous nails!). These may sound incredibly simplistic or even mundane or shallow to someone with loftier goals, but honestly, I’m as happy as a clam at high tide if I’ve got those.’
A clam at high tide doesn’t ask for all that much: water, sand, motion.
IF WE GET IT RIGHT, ert can bookend our days with purpose. So we should search for our own ert. It might not be a tangible object. For many people, it is simply motion. For those of us who have been depressed, anxious or severely ill, ert could just be being able to stand, walk and move throughout a day. For others it could be swimming, dancing, running or walking — all of which help to keep us calm and strong, and to combat depression and other ailments, as numerous studies have confirmed. Indeed, the point of ert is momentum. One foot in front of the other. One arm circling after the other. One word tumbling out after the other. Whatever propels you forward.
Michael McCarthy, a British environmentalist and journalist, found ert in butterflies. In his book The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, McCarthy describes the moment when, as a seven-year-old, he fell in love with these delicate creatures. It was in 1954, the year his mother was sent to a mental hospital after her mind ‘fell apart’ and Michael and his brother went to live with their aunt in Merseyside, England. One morning, going out to play, Michael noticed a nearby buddleia tree covered with ‘jewels as big as my seven-year-old hand, jewels flashing dazzling colour combinations . . . How could there be such living gems?’ he wrote. It was at this moment, he writes, when ‘butterflies entered my soul’. Thereafter, ‘every morning in that hot but fading summer, as my mother suffered silently and my brother cried out, I ran to check on them, never tiring of watching these free-flying spirits with wings as bright as flags’.
The butterflies ignited a life’s passion. Ever since, McCarthy has spent his life studying and admiring the natural world — birds, insects and blooms — and now he is lamenting the loss of it. The Moth Snowstorm looks at the once-abundant, now-dwindling populations of sparrows, larks, mayflies and moths, reminding us of a time when night drives meant the thudding of hundreds of moths on windscreens and regular stops to scrub away the ‘astounding richness of life’ that smeared your vision, like a snowstorm. Now, he says, humans are wrecking the Earth and trashing our natural abundance. Just as Rachel Carson, and so many others have said, McCarthy insists that if we delight in nature and find joy there, we will not so carelessly plunder, neglect and destroy it. He calls it ‘defence through joy’. Nature is, after all, ‘part of our essence — the natural home for our psyches’.
For some, awe is their ert. American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done some fascinating work on moral elevation, or acts of virtue or moral beauty that warm or uplift other people, making them more likely to do similar things. When I asked him if his research on this had changed the way he lived, he said he was already an ‘awe junkie: I seek out awe experiences . . . When I have them, I understand them better than I would have before. And I understand the urge to share them with others.’
Haidt, who is now Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says he has pursued awe since he was young: ‘I just always did things, from my teen years, to get awe-inspiring views: I’d climb trees, climb up on roofs and just sit . . . I’ve been a secular atheist since around the age of fourteen, but always craved awe experiences and they felt like a kind of worship. That’s what led to my studies of elevation and awe.’
For others, beauty can provide ert — both solace and purpose. My friend Shane Clifton, a gentle theologian with a sharp intellect, reports exactly this. Almost a decade ago, he had an accident that left him a quadriplegic. ‘For a long time,’ he says, ‘I was desperately unhappy. Then, against all expectations, I emerged from the grind of despair. I didn’t get better, and will always struggle with the limits, pains and vulnerabilities of a broken body in a world not yet shaped for disability. Yet, joy snuck up on me.’
This joy, he says, came from reading the writings of the likes of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on the happiness that comes from living a meaningful life, as well as ‘the Christian gospel, which speaks with a special clarity when we suffer’; from the love of his family and friends; and from discovering ‘the potent history and diverse gifts of the disabled community’, through which he ‘came to understand that my weaknesses and failures did not render me powerless, but could become fonts of strength’.
Through all of this, Clifton says, the revelation of beauty changed him. The once passionate surfer hated the beach after his accident, as he felt ‘tormented by waves I could not ride’. But one night, years after he had lost the use of his limbs, when he was watching a sunset over Sharkies Beach at Wollongong, he says, ‘I realised that I felt only wonder at the pink clouds reflecting off the glassy waves. And while the sunset was temporary, I started to notice that the natural and social world could be beautiful and awash with meaning.’ Now he craves beauty, and draws strength and joy from it — as well as, he says, from expensive whisky and laughter.
Ert can be found in work, too. Work often gets dismissed simply as a distraction from what really matters or as simple slog, but being enveloped in work you enjoy — paid or unpaid — can be hugely satisfying and meaningful. This is especially the case if work is your passion, something you love. British biographer Claire Tomalin told The Guardian that when she is upset about something, ‘I go into my study and work’. Her work has sustained her through all of the pain and difficulties her life has brought her at times. One of her children died as a baby, another was born with spina bifida, and her first husband, a reporter (who had cheated on her for years), was killed by a Syrian missile. She raised four children on her own; one of them committed suicide when studying at university. Somehow, throughout it all, Tomalin gained respite by entering into imaginative worlds — the lives of her subjects — and writing. She said that closing the door to her study and entering the world she was writing about, such as Charles Dickens’ Victorian London, was like entering into another world so completely it was as though she was ‘sinking into the mud’ of the dirty streets. Writing has often been like that for me, too. Utter absorption and purpose.
Ert is that tiny spark within us that reaches out of the mess of daily life towards what is good, and towards what it is we most crave to be, do and love. Sometimes, it is simply a drive to survive.
Chapter 19
Growing by the Light of the Moon
The bud seemed to follow the moon, and when the plants were placed at a window with a western aspect a fresh movement was seen, and this continued until the moon disappeared behind the hills.