5. Touching Skin
Find a comfortable, warm space and get naked. Close your eyes, and for five minutes, touch yourself gently, without any specific intent. You are not aiming to arouse yourself, though arousal might happen. All that you are doing is touching your own skin, meditating on the feeling. If five minutes is too short a time, try seven, or even ten.
When the exercise is over, immediately record your feelings in your Book of Wonder.
Repeat the exercise for a week.
Then, if you have a willing partner, do it with them. If possible, both of you should be blindfolded. On at least seven occasions, with no more than three days between them, spend ten minutes together, naked, touching and being touched. Negotiate boundaries, if any, beforehand: once the exercise begins, it is better not to talk at all.
Do not try to be sexy. Just touch, be touched, and focus on the feeling.
6. Burning Bright
When is your soul at its brightest?
Spend a week with this question. Write down in your Book of Wonder any answers you might find, even when (especially when) they are contradictory. Write down any random thoughts, any ideas that the question might inspire.
The Portals
A new breed of rebels was quietly rising
‘You look better,’ said Paola. The cab had left. I was on the threshold of home.
I was back from the remote place where I shut myself away to write. I had almost finished this book. When I am in my hermitage I stick to a brutal schedule, which sees me working from the moment I get out of bed to the moment I have to crawl back into it. That does not make me look better. I knew for a fact that I was tired and sleep-deprived, I had a beard too long to be handsomely rugged and too short to be wizardly wise; my eyes were half-closed, and the half that was visible was reddish. ‘Sure,’ I said.
‘I mean it,’ Paola insisted. ‘You seem… happier.’
I stepped inside and glanced at myself in the mirror hanging next to our front door. She had a point. I wasn’t going to be targeted by any Hollywood director for the starring role in a romantic comedy, but then again, that wouldn’t happen even on my best day. Nonetheless, I seemed at ease with myself in a way I hadn’t been for a long while. The book was almost done. The process had caused a fundamental shift to take place inside me.
It would be a plump lie to say that writing had been easy. Writing is the best job in the world, and the best things in life are never easy. The plans you have never survive the impact with reality. I did not write this book in an unbroken state of wonder and I am not promising you that by reading it, and working your way through the Wonder Workouts, you will effortlessly achieve such a state. And thank goodness for that. Sadness, boredom and worry are also part of a well-lived life.
But something had changed. I had re-immersed myself in one of my oldest passions, the study of wonder. I had written and tested a series of exercises, I had talked to people and read books and tried new things. I had opened myself to surprises and I had been, indeed, surprised. For example, the last key did not figure in my original plan: I realized the importance of embodied wonder while I was searching for the Fifth Key. What seems obvious now was not obvious at the time. The journey was completely real to me, and it had changed me in positive, rather than predictable, ways. Where before I had been on the defensive, and had felt anxious about the difficulties in my life and the world in general, now I was ready – even eager – to fight back. I felt larger, open to whatever new and unexpected things might come my way. And also capable of making new and unexpected things happen.
Meanwhile, the world had got worse.
*
In Britain, politicians of both the right and left seemed to be intent on stoking tensions between native Britons and immigrants – and on sowing discord between people of different faiths and cultural traditions. They said that the free movement of nomads like me was the root of all evil, and that curbing freedom was a good thing; they said that the country should take in only those who brought ‘useful’ skills – and of course, they were the ones who would decide what was useful, and to whom. They also decided that the likes of me – the foreigners – would have to apply to receive a number, which would identify us from then on. They decided that we will have to show that number when we need a GP, or to have any of our rights secured; and that we would have to pay for the privilege out of our own pockets. Some of us foreigners were asked to trial this new scheme, and in exchange they would receive their little number first; and some of us were terrified enough, or well-trained enough, to oblige. The situation carried uncomfortable echoes of tragedies past, and very few voices, from either left or right, were raised against it.
Italy, my other country, was faring no better. Its new rulers, a gang of illiterate bullies, allowed migrants to die at sea, and campaigned for parents to stop vaccinating their children in the name of long-debunked pseudoscience, spreading ignorance so that they could prey on it. While the United States, a country regarded for decades as the rock and pillar of the West, continued to be ruled by that most dangerous creature known to humankind, an idiot trying to look smart.
The values that had defined my life – inclusivity, the importance of higher education and universal access to it, a globalism based on a joyful celebration of diversity rather than a fearful push for assimilation – were under attack from all sides. What had changed was that, as I watched myself in the mirror, unshaven and pale, for the first time in a long time I thought, let them come.
Fear and hatred were not all that was rising in the world. Falcons were soaring over the rooftops of major cities, secret societies were fighting back against disenchantment, fairies were creeping back to sabotage our clockwork universe, science was discovering frontiers stranger than our strangest dreams. Of course there were people desperately trying to stop this surging wave. They were afraid; as they should be. A new breed of rebels was quietly rising against them. Our culture, our way of life, our financial situation too, would change massively in the years to come, but they might still change for the best. We could make them change for the best.
In conversation with Neil Gaiman, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro made the observation that since the Industrial Revolution children have been allowed fantasy, have even been encouraged to pursue it, only as long as they are children: ‘but then, when they get to a certain age, they have to start getting prepared to be units of the labour force’.1 When we come of age, we are told to let go of our imagination and stick to the harsh facts of life, which were decided for us before we were born, and will accompany us to the grave. We must develop ‘useful’ skills, and we are made to believe that we can never decide for ourselves what is useful and what is not. When people start imagining a different world, they might end up building it, and getting rid of the old one.
The psychologist Paul Piff rigged a game of Monopoly in order to carry out an experiment relating to entitlement. At the beginning of the game, he gave some players much more money than others. The ‘wealthy’ players knew that they had more cash than the ‘poor’ ones, and vice versa: all the players were perfectly aware that the game was rigged. The wealthy ones won, as was inevitable. When they were asked to explain their victory, however, they did not factor in their initial advantage. Rather, they spoke about how cleverly they had played,2 and how much they deserved their win. It is desperate to see how easily we convince ourselves that we deserve the privileges we have; how self-centred we are.