I spent the first few minutes silently cursing myself. Common sense urged me to let go, to stop being stupid and act like an adult. I waited, until the awkwardness passed and was replaced by boredom. Still I waited and still I carried on hugging Quercus robur. Then something snapped.
I became aware of the feeling only when it was over: while it was happening, I did not have a clear sense of time, or of myself. It was a sensuous feeling that words are not made to describe: the best way I can translate it is by saying that my body understood that I was part of the woods. My feet rested on the same earth the oak tree had planted its roots in, and my lungs breathed in the oxygen it produced.
There was nothing revelatory about this realization, nothing mind-blowing. It is common knowledge that trees and people are joined in one ecosystem. What was new was the intensity with which I felt the connectedness, in my arms, my cheek, my guts – not as an idea, but as a physical sensation as palpable as thirst. I was, I realized, embodying every last hippie cliché, but I didn’t care, because while I was holding on to that tree, every last hippie cliché was true. If I had to use a word to describe what had happened, I would say I had opened myself in a way that was out of character for my bookish, doubting self. The tree was doing that to me.
Our fear of touch is fear of being touched; of opening ourselves to the new and unexpected. When we move beyond that, when we train our skin to feel again, we can sense wonder with our whole body; we can embrace wonder, and we can, at last, let wonder embrace us.
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I am convinced that human beings have a soul. I couldn’t possibly say whether it survives the death of the body or not, and I don’t think anybody can answer this question. But we do have a souclass="underline" there is a part of us that is not body and it is not mind, and it is not Marsilio Ficino’s ‘spirit’. It is far, far stranger than that. While scientists and philosophers have explained many things about our body and mind, and will explain many more in the future, there is little to say about our soul. It is just there.
In his poem ‘The Tyger’, William Blake considers the remarkable physical reality of a tiger, and wonders who could have created such a beast. The poem takes the form of a series of questions that come together to describe the creature at its core. The questions are asked and never answered; we never get to know ‘what immortal hand or eye’ framed the beast’s ‘fearful symmetry’. Some questions are just too good to be belittled by answers.
‘The Tyger’ is one of the most perfect celebrations of wonder I have ever encountered. It revels in sensuousness: every time I read it aloud, I feel the tiger prowling savagely from line to line. There is beauty in the sounds of this poem, and fear also: in the last line, the ‘could’ of the opening stanza’s question ‘what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry’ is replaced by the more disquieting ‘dare’. The unashamed sensuousness of the tiger leads us to the heart of mystery, and mystery is dangerous, for it destroys our certainties without ever giving us the consolation of new ones.
The tiger is a wonderful image for our soul.
Our soul, too, is a mystery. We cannot define it precisely and we cannot decide what it is exactly, but we feel it when we are kissing a person we love, biting into an apple in a Somerset orchard, smelling the fragrance of jasmine, looking down on our city from high above, or listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor. We catch glimpses of our soul in the thick foliage of our senses.
In a book celebrating uncertainty, American Zen philosopher Alan Watts said that we can understand an experience in two different ways. One way is just having it: you are happy when you are happy. The moment at which you think ‘I am happy’, you are already filtering the experience, you are already interpreting it through the lenses of words and culture. Which brings us to the second mode, the most common, in which we have the experience and ‘compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it’.13 In so doing, we doom ourselves never to enjoy an experience that is entirely new, because the moment something new happens, we define it in terms of experiences we have had previously. How does the juice of this particular apple taste? It’s nothing special; you have had apples before. You translate this apple here, special and unique, into the abstract category of ‘apple’. You ignore your senses to listen to your own ideas, and you seal yourself off from the world.
As we grow older, we do this more and more. We stop sensing the new and unexpected, and thus we stop sensing wonder. We have tasted so many different apples that we become utterly incapable of appreciating that we have never tasted that particular apple before, and we shall never taste it again.
This journey we are taking, which we have started but can never really finish, is a journey of unlearning. At every step of the way, we have rid ourselves of more certainties, we have shed another layer of our armour, to make us ready to step into the world naked and vulnerable, to feel the wind caress our skin, and open the door to wonder.
Alan Watts remarks that our culture is not at all materialistic, ‘if a materialist is a person who loves matter’. We have the opposite problem: ‘the brainy modern loves not matter but measures’.14 We have created a maze of abstractions to surround and protect us, so that we can ignore the material reality of the world. Children are awake to that reality: they don’t yet know enough of the world to have learned to rein in their senses. We can be awake to that reality too, with a little effort and a lot of courage. Through a fuller engagement with our senses, with the material reality of scents and flavours, we can rediscover our soul, the mystery we carry within.
We can be the tiger, and burn bright.
THE WORKOUT
1. Slow Down
For a week, make a conscious effort to feast your eyes on things you enjoy looking at. When you are out walking and you notice a car you like, deliberately stop to look at its shape, its colours, its movement. When you see a pleasant image, linger on it. When you see your lover’s face, look at it for more than a few moments, and appreciate what you see.
Do the same with especially displeasing images and shapes.
Note down in your Book of Wonder how this affects your feelings.
2. Tune In
For a week, three times a day, stop whatever you are doing and listen. Make a note of all the sounds and voices you hear. How many would normally go unnoticed? Keep doing the exercise for the entire week, even though you may think you have ‘got it’ after the first day; it is a way to attune your body to your environment. Select different times of the day to do the exercise. How does the soundtrack of your life change at different times of day?
3. Smell That
For a week, smell as many things as possible. Smell food, phones, chairs, trays and (politely, with their consent) other people. Smell the air in your house, the air on your commute, the air in your workplace. Make a note of all these smells – try to describe them, in writing, in your Book of Wonder. This way, you will build up a mental encyclopedia of aromas that will help you perceive more smells, and in turn, broaden the encyclopedia itself.
4. Don’t Bolt Your Food
This exercise will require two weeks.
During the course of the first week, eat as you would normally do, and focus on each flavour. Does the flavour of crisps give you deep pleasure – or not? Is the sugary sweetness of doughnuts pleasant on your tongue? Is the texture of this refrigerated ham sandwich satisfying to you? As usual, make a note of your findings in your Book of Wonder.
In the second week, eat only food that you really enjoy, even if this means having to spend time cooking it. While you eat, do not do anything else, except for talking with friends. Do not send emails, do not check your phone at all, do not watch TV, do not work. That goes for all meals throughout the day, even snacking (if you eat snacks). How does this change your attitude to flavour? And how difficult would it be to accommodate this way of eating into your daily routine?