My Local Park Is/Not Amazing

Everything takes work. Love takes work. Loving the world takes work.

How we get in a mess is our strong need to believe that this isn’t so.

I have been more or less housebound for 10 months. I go outside when I have to, for medical appointments and pay the price in sleep. I have started to notice that I can, occasionally, get away with doing this. The price for overexertion is fatigue, the kind of tiredness that sweeps me away for days. I call them grey outs. Even my thoughts are slow. 

But I decide it is time to go out. We will go out in the car and sit in a park. I know the park, a cafe perched on a hill, green fields rolling down with a line of trees below. It takes almost a month for the stars to align, the energy to feel right and the week to have just enough space in it. We go.

I have dreamed of this park. The absolute worst face this place can show me is one where I will be sitting under the sky, smelling wet grass, surrounded by green. I can’t imagine a scenario where it would not be the most blissful experience of my life. 

It isn’t everything I want from life of course. 

I want to be able to walk again, run, go out by myself. I want to climb mountains and sleep under the stars. But having spent every day of the last 10 months under a white ceiling, breathing inside air, looking at the same four walls, this trip is as close to heaven as I can imagine in the immediate present. It’s cold and spitting rain when we decide to go. I don’t care. I know that the experience will be so far past amazing that the weather won’t matter.

We arrive at the park. My partner wheels me over to the cafe and we settle at a table outside. We’re the only ones out here, those brave enough to venture out today are sitting inside the cafe where it’s warm and dry. We burrow down in our coats, partially shielded from the wind by one side of the building. As my partner brings out the tea, a serviette is snatched by the wind and disappears in an instant. I try to focus on the sky above me, the distant trees blowing in the wind.

And it’s okay. Fine really. There is no piece of the picture missing. I am under the sky, breathing in the cold air. I can smell that particular smell of soil after rain. The trees are magnificent, the path into the woods dark and deep. A fallen tree is hosting a fountain of woodlice. An alsatian brings a small log up to the trunk and lays it carefully as if at a shrine. I can see a few lone leaves on the trees. A wall of brambles snarled up, a home for secret life. Crows hover with skill in the wind like noisy black flags. A robin hustles us for crumbs.

I have spent a considerable time imagining this day. I know better than the next thousand people you could ask that being here, out in the wild is a gift beyond rubies. That there is no reaction short of pure awe that is appropriate. 

And yet all I can think is that it’s fine. I guess. Meh.

Why?

My brain is quick to jump in with an answer.

It’s not good enough! 

It’s not good enough unless…

I can walk

I can be here on a nicer day

I can do it regularly without worrying about a setback

I can do it on my own

“That’s why,” it says. “If you could fix that, you would feel everything.”

And that’s comforting because it tells me that my lack of feeling is not my fault. Outside problems are responsible. Innately, I am capable of instantly feeling everything. I’m just a victim of circumstance.

This trick usually works because we are frightened of being people who don’t feel things. We would rather any answer than the truth:

The essence of you is someone who doesn’t always love things.

That’s an awful thing to take in about yourself.

It’s not always true. Sometimes we are overwhelmed with love for a person or a place. Sometimes love is a tap in a 50s sitcom that sprays everywhere, unendingly. Sometimes there is too much feeling. 

But sometimes it takes work, and that is one of the things we don’t know how to talk about, along with periods, chronic illness and latex.

So our brains tell us a comforting lie. “This is not your fault.”

And we believe it because it means that we are innately loving, all the time. It also means that we, personally, don’t have to change anything about ourselves to fix it. We can do a lot of external things, researching on the internet, shouting at people, taking supplements, switching jobs. We can worry about it. But we don’t have to take responsibility for it. We are loving people. If we can’t love, then something outside of us is wrong.

“You can only love this when you can walk around it,” my brain says about the park. “Mystery solved.”

For the last ten months my brain has sworn blind that this specific moment will make me happy. It has also told me that I will never make it outside, that my condition will prevent this one magical thing from happening.

I am outside. I have made it. I am not swept away.

“But you have to walk though, to be happy,” my brain says, moving the goal posts.

It’s like a dog that creeps across the living room, reaches out and delicately takes your sandwich in its jaws from the coffee table at your knees. I can see you stealing my sandwich Jasper. This is not a secret crime in the way that you think it is, because you are doing it in front of me. 

My brain has been lying to me for ten months and now it is changing the lie and expecting me to go along with it. 

Had I built this park up too much? Yes.

But I have also experienced this over and over again for most of my life. Encountering beauty, knowing that another element is required to allow me the time and space to enjoy that beauty.

Something has changed.

Maybe it is that I need the promise of this park, viscerally need it like a survivor on a raft needs their ten grams of beef jerky. It’s my promised rations and I will flip this boat if I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s that I am up to here with people trying to bullshit me. Chronic illness means overworked and understaffed medical support without answers which takes the word “care” and makes it too dirty to bring inside until it's been hosed down.

Maybe I am too tired to lie to myself. I don’t instantly worship this park, that tree, this cold air. If that reveals something terrible to me about myself, it’s going to have to fight to get in the top three. 

I have given up, really properly quit more than once.

I have been willing to sell my soul, or anyone else's for relief. 

I have really genuinely hated everyone, including myself. 

Being someone who can’t love nature is hurtful but it’s part of a larger portrait at this point, one by Francis Bacon with the eyeballs all over the place. 

I am tired and honest enough, with little enough to lose that instead of grasping for an attractive lie, I sit there and ask the scary question. The interesting question.

What does it mean if I don’t love the world all that much, most of the time? 

How long has this been going on for?

Well the report isn’t terrible. I went on the Tour Du Mont Blanc before getting ill and had a lovely awe filled moment at sunrise on a mountain while camping. Aside from that? Most of the moments when I could have been filled with the wonders of nature I wasn’t.

Maybe I was worrying about things, my partner’s health, my health, my job, my life. And it would be easy to say that it is simply anxiety that stops me from feeling deeply. It’s certainly in the mix. But sometimes I am present, noticing, and just…not feeling it.

But it is still the brain, of course, that’s at the heart of this. We get stuck in our heads and even when we’re not actively worrying, our brains are hovering, ready to drag us back in, to sweep all of this away so we can move onto the next thing. The invisible matrix of things done, things that need to be done, the progress bars and spreadsheets that form an invisible tunnel from break of day to sleep, blurring the world around us.

Trees don’t matter. They aren’t progressing anything, they don’t fix or tick anything off, you can’t eat them or impress them. They won’t make you richer or more successful or have any impact on your problems or symptoms or failings. As far as the brain is concerned, you are just being endearingly weird by trying to care about a tree. Your life is insufficient right now. It’s gapingly unfinished. Your brain has sensibly filled it with tasks and meetings and challenges that will slowly inch you closer to the person you are supposed to be, the life that will ensure you are healthy, loved, homed, protected, financially and socially safe. If you sit around smiling at trees all day you are going to end up living alone in a bin with few possessions and fewer teeth, for your few remaining years. You are going to die.

This is the stakes the brain is working with. Death. The only thing that the brain weighs against this kind of danger has to be spectacular to justify air time. It has to be a mountain at dawn. Otherwise it’s just going to have to wait until your life is perfect. Obviously.

Unfortunately, our brains were never given parameters to work with that would end this program. Monstrously, they will attempt to increase our safety long past the point when we might arguably be declared safe. They cannot stop.

My brain immediately rears up at this statement. “But you are not safe!”

The amount of safety we feel has no relationship to how safe we are.

It only relates to how much control we have over our brains.

We will never feel that the time is right to look at a tree. 

As a result of this badly wired control system, our own hardware is actively trying to prevent us from being emotionally present with anything. The brain will pause the stress bus for a few things in life. The wedding, the baby, the mountain, the funeral and when they tell us the plane is going down. Even then it is the strict school teacher. One photo, from one angle then we need to be on our way.

Unlearning this habit takes work. 

Why is this such an infuriating, shameful thought?

Because nature, like a baby, is something we instinctively feel that we are supposed to have automatic feelings about. When we draw a blank, we are failing to Human properly.

Because work is boring and soulless. Few of us are genuinely passionate about our work all the time. The vast majority of us work for other people, and even those lucky enough to do something we deeply love still spend a large percentage of the time

Getting the actors to calm the hell down and eat something

Rewriting the damn code line by line so the jedi don’t float one inch above the ground

Cleaning out the icing bag

Most skills worth having take somewhere between hundreds and thousands of hours to master.

Fast skills? Rock cakes, a clove hitch and SOS in morse code. 

A basic level of Spanish is 300 hours. Looking snazzy at Flamenco class instead of like a sharp tailed grouse in mating mode? Months.

One of the most popular archetypes in film feature a hero being told that they are the one, aka magically endowed with mastery of a skill, bypassing the lifetime of work necessary to gain that skill. Because learning a skill is boring and unrewarding for most of those hours and we don’t want to see someone do that, let alone do it ourselves. We just want to have the experience of being that good at something. Just hand it to us so we can try it out. Having to learn a skill means making choices that exclude other things. For every thing we decide to invest in, something else is put aside. For the really big stuff (astronaut training, a twisting double backflip off a balance beam), it means putting other things aside forever. We’re committing our lives. Doing that involves either blind passion, or a clear understanding of the fact that life is limited and doorways close. Making choices is a kind of death.

Who wouldn’t rather hang around waiting to see if Ewan McGregor is about to show up and tell you you’re a jedi with automatic superpowers? It has to be better than confronting the fact that we are going to spend most of our lives working towards something, briefly enjoy mastering it and then die. With our options open, we can live forever.

I have been learning Spanish for 65 hours using the immersion method. I tune in for 30 minutes a day and watch videos of people speaking Spanish, very slowly. I don’t understand what anyone is saying. I spend most of the classes wanting to find a tambien, whatever that is and hit someone with it. It feels ridiculous to imagine that this will result in anything. If I wasn’t trapped in my situation, I would have quit months ago.

Our emotions are supposed to be a break from all this. We are given to understand that emotions are infinite, they don’t run out, you don’t have to choose which ones to keep and they’ll always be there. Our deep connection to beauty, love and joy is our superpower. It’s the gift bestowed on us by good fairies, it’s Hagrid in a cabin shouting that we are the most important wizards in the world. 

So the idea that we might have to work at being emotionally switched on feels…well it feels pretty crap.

It’s a weird advantage, being chronically ill because I’m past the first hurdle. 

I can admit, honestly, that I’m not filled with joy at the wonders of the world a lot of the time. 

For people whose lives are on track and who have gained the things they have spent years working on, that’s a hard thing to admit to.

The next challenge is overcoming the belief that the fault lies elsewhere. 

I have a pretty compelling argument to make that I’m not overwhelmed by spring flowers because I feel really ill a lot of the time. It’s a winning hand in stress bingo. But it doesn’t explain the three decades that precede it. 

I know now that the brain is running a long con. 

I can’t use my own reasoning to determine when I have capacity to be impressed by the world.

And this is another way in which my illness confers a weird advantage. Because I have fallen out of the world in every way that matters. Life, with all its speed, travel, conflicts, information, levelling up, promotions, networks and goal scoring is happening elsewhere. It’s quiet here in the shallows where I’ve washed up. Every day I wake up and run the same routines, look at the same view out of the window. 

I have nothing but time. Eventually, despite all the nonsense my brain can throw at me, I get round to the question.

What does it mean if I don’t love the world all that much, most of the time? 

How can I start loving it more?

And the answer, like learning Spanish, is work that I, as a chronically ill person am uniquely suited to do.

I have an incredible amount of training at doing tasks over and over again that seem pointless

I am used to receiving next to no support and having to figure things out on my own

I know what it is to work on something with no definable end goal and an unspecified chance of success

I am unable to do a lot of the work I would like to do right now. I can’t train for a marathon, or progress my career. Building new relationships is hard when you can’t get downstairs. I can’t afford to take a course, or stay awake through it either.

If learning to feel deeply is work that can be done inside with limited hours each day on my own schedule, I can be a good student. And if it leads to an outcome that I can benefit from in my current state, that makes it a rare class of experience.

What would it mean to look at the horse chestnut outside the window and really see it as something amazing? To look out of the window and go “Holy shit!” instead of just “shit.”

Right now that tree is a taunt. It is the outside of my effective range. I imagine better views and wonder if I’ll ever get there. I worry about our foundations. 

What if the gentle sway of the branches was as exciting as the time lapse video of a tree growing? A phenomenal, slightly frightening burst of life out of the pavement, peering in at me through the window? If the leaves, just starting to reappear now, suddenly took off, revealing themselves to be one thousand parakeets, that would be downright cool. What if the new leaves curled in on themselves, still sleeping, were as astonishing as one thousand parakeets in flight?

It doesn’t make any difference to anything. It won’t fix me. But what if this period of my life is my opportunity to slowly, ten minutes at a time over however many years, develop the kind of seeing that will make the next chapter of my life completely wild? A feast of wonders? 

And maybe chronic illness is not an opportunity. Maybe it’s a stain with no redeeming features. But I can’t stand up for long enough to learn to bake and my doctor is (still) not returning my calls so what else am I supposed to do right now? 

I might just as well see if I can learn how to love the world.