In a previous blog I invited you to consider if all of your triumphs, all of your successes, really came about through your effort. And in another blog I question if you should cultivate an active curious mind.
These concepts are related.
Steve is real, even though he is a composite character.
Steve was a professional, accomplished and busy, but it was not his work that people remembered. It was the astonishing range of his curiosity. At a dinner he might begin with the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs – how a single carved stone unlocked a language that had been silent for two thousand years – and before the plates were cleared he had moved on to the mathematics of an unbreakable cipher, the migration of monarch butterflies across a continent they have never seen, the strange harmonies of medieval church music, the secret and violent history hidden in the etymology of some perfectly ordinary word. His mind leapt from one bright thing to the next like a flame running along a fuse. People adored it. “What a mind,” they said. “It never rests.” They meant it as the highest praise, and he received it as such.
He was never bored. Boredom, he would have told you, was for the dull, and he was anything but dull. There was always another fascination waiting, another door to fling open, another rabbit hole to vanish down with delight. He thought he was fully alive.
The years passed, as years do.
He could not have told you when the change began, because it came not as an event but as a slow loss of color, the way a photograph fades in the sun. The fascinations were still there. But chasing them no longer delighted him; it merely exhausted him. The flame that had run so merrily along the fuse now seemed to scorch him as it passed. He woke tired and went to bed tired, and in between, his wonderful, restless mind would not leave him alone – it dragged him from thought to thought and worry to worry with the same tireless energy that had once enchanted his friends, except that now there was no delight in any of the destinations, only the dragging. He possessed everything he had ever found interesting, and he was profoundly, immovably depressed.
He went to the people one goes to. They were kind, and they were learned, and they did not help. At last, more out of exhaustion than hope, he travelled to see an old master of whom he had heard, and he laid the whole of it before him – the brilliance, the curiosity, the years of admiration, and now the grey weight that had settled over all of it and would not lift.
The master listened to the very end without a word. Steve waited to be asked about his childhood, his disappointments, the chemistry of his brain. Instead the master said something that made no sense to him at all.
“For your whole life,” he said gently, “you have gone wherever your mind wished to take you. You have been its most faithful servant. You never once refused it. Is it any wonder that you are tired?”
Steve did not understand, and said so.
“You believed you were the rider,” said the master. “In reality you were the cargo. There was a horse, and it was strong and quick and it loved to run, and for many years it ran toward sunlit meadows, and you felt the wind in your face and called it freedom. Now it runs through brambles and over sharp stones, and you feel the wounds and call it depression. But hear me: you were never steering. Not in the meadows, and not in the brambles. The horse went where it wished, and you were tied to its back the whole time. What has changed is not that you have lost your way. It is that you have finally noticed you were never holding the reins.”
I tell this story because Steve’s affliction is, in quieter form, an epidemic — and it wears the mask of a virtue.
We admire the restless mind. We call it curiosity, energy, brilliance; we envy the person who is never still, never bored, always on to the next thing. And there is nothing wrong with curiosity – the master did not tell Steve to stop loving hieroglyphs and ciphers. The affliction was never the destination. The affliction was that Steve had never, in the whole of his life, chosen to be still. He had mistaken motion for living, occupation for meaning, and stimulation for peace, and so he had handed himself over, completely and without protest, to be dragged.
A mind like that is a magnificent servant and a merciless master. Yours, I assure you, is the same. It will run toward whatever glitters, and as long as the running feels good you will swear you are free. But you are not choosing the meadows; the horse is. And a horse that can carry you to a meadow can just as easily carry you into the brambles, and you will have exactly as much say in the matter then as you did before – which is to say, none.
True peace of mind does not come from finding a more interesting place for your mind to gallop to. There is no such place. The next fascination soothes you for an afternoon and then demands the one after it, and the one after that, forever. Peace comes from something the restless person has never once tried: stillness. It comes when you can sit, unoccupied, reaching for nothing, and not feel that you are dying. It comes when you are no longer dragged — when the thoughts still arise, as thoughts will, but you watch them come and go from the bank instead of being swept along in the current. The mind churns, and while it churns you cannot see to the bottom of the lake. Let it grow still, and you find that the clear water, and the depth, were there the whole time.
I will not pretend this is easy. The first time you sit with the intention of a quiet mind, the servant who has ruled you for decades will rise up in fury and insist that this is boredom, that this is waste, that there are a thousand fascinating things you ought to be chasing instead. Do not believe it. That voice is not you. It is the horse, objecting to the reins. Take them up anyway, gently, again and again — and one day, not soon, but one day, you will feel the animal slow beneath you and come, at last, to a halt.
And in that stillness you will find what Steve crossed the world to look for and could not find in any of his brilliant destinations: a mind that is finally yours, and a peace that was never, in fact, anywhere else.
Peace!
