A glorious post from the Place of Peace

We are so blessed with the joy that horses can bring us – here’s a lovely post from my Facebook friend Tania Kindersley

I sometimes wonder whether I am overdoing it, with all this Place of Peace. This question is asked by the voices of the Not Good Enough Gremlins and the Perfection Demons and, possibly, a new addition to the internal crew – the Crack On With It Imps. The imps are closely related to The Shoulds, who bust into your house, eat all your snacks, and refuse to leave. And, like all the internal critical voices, they are not completely wrong. Sometimes, cracking on with it is an excellent tactic. Sometimes, I do need to stiffen my sinews and be stoical and not fall into the chasms of drama or rumination.

However, in this case, I don’t think I am overdoing it. When I say ‘it’, I mean: the quest for inner peace and the voyage to a sturdy sense of self and the building of a reassuring toolbox filled with competence and resilience and steadiness.

I mean the things that make us modern humans happy. I do believe in happiness, and I believe we can train ourselves in it, just like you train yourself to speak a language or work with wood or play the violin.

I mean: reducing non-necessary suffering and adding to the sum total of human flourishing and generally being open to the joy.

That’s what all this is about. That is the gift the red mare gave to me, when she set me off on her very own Self-Improvement Plan. I was not the human she wanted, so I had to change. Otherwise, in a very real way, I was going to die, because she showed her distress and displeasure by rearing and spooking and hurling herself about, and when you are sitting on a half-ton flight animal who is doing those things, physical danger lurks around every corner.

Because I have a dash of all or nothing in my nature, when I began to find new ways of being, I wanted to know all of them. I read and read and listened and listened and found fascinating people and ransacked the internet, finding illumination and wisdom wherever I could. I remember thinking that it was so lucky this all came with the age of the internet, because I live deep in the countryside and there are no lecture halls nearby; no London library or Bodley.

All the same, I do occasionally pause and check. Is it simply a very determined bee which is buzzing loudly in my own bonnet? Perhaps it was just that I was a bit messed up and needed all this help. Perhaps everyone else is mostly fine.

This morning, as I was contemplating this, I was doing the manual chores and listening to an improving podcast. (I do sometimes listen to absurd podcasts, or totally diverting audiobooks which do not improve my mind one jot. I don’t want you to think that I am always working on myself, every moment of the day. That would be joyless, which defeats the whole object of the exercise.)

Anyway, this particular improving podcast was with a man who is ludicrously successful, in the obvious, worldly sense. Massive, massive audience. Top guests. Vast amounts of income, I would guess. And on this sunny morning, as I picked up the dung, I heard him say how good he had it. I can’t remember precisely what he said – it wasn’t quite that he had a dream life, or all the luck he could be doing with, or a very comfortable existence, but it was along those lines. He observed, correctly, that he had worked hard for all of that luck and good fortune. I know that getting to that level of success requires crazy amounts of work. I also know that he’d been through the mill and seems like a good-hearted person who deserves his success.

But then he said – and this was the incredibly sorrowful part – that joy, and feeling gratitude for joy, were elusive. I emphasise the elusive because it’s so haunting and so important and it was such an interesting choice of word and I remember it. I paused the audio and put down my dung-removing implements and looked about and thought: that’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.

It’s sad because this fellow has, on paper, everything – he’s intelligent and articulate and he’s built something up from scratch and he talks to all these wise people who tell him brilliant things and I think he has a nice family, but something as small and simple as joy is elusive for him. (As I think of it now, I note that he was brave to admit the fact.)

I thought, instantly – he could come to Scotland and stand in The Place of Peace with the red mare, who invented that dream-state with her bare hooves, and feel the stillness and the rootedness and the realness and maybe that would rearrange his atoms, as it does mine. (At least, that’s what it feels like to me.) I thought: I am not overdoing it. If clever and successful people, with the world at their feet, can’t feel the joy, then the Place of Peace is needed more than ever. I thought of a line I once heard in a film and always loved, which went something like, ‘I’m not just clickin’ my teeth.’

No, I’m not. There is a reason for all this. It’s because there are people out there who are doing well on paper, who have everything they need, and who cannot quite open themselves to the joy. If I can shift that, even by one tenth of one millimetre, then I’ll have done something worthwhile.

There are two things I want to say about joy.

The first is that it is something small and simple. The reason I know this is that children do it, all the time. They don’t have to learn it, like they learn language, or how to play, or the social contract. It’s in them.

I saw a photograph of the newest great-nephew this morning, with his dad, both in their pyjamas. The little chap, who is seven months old, was beaming and gleaming with joy. He doesn’t have any money; he doesn’t have a job; he can’t speak English. He can’t walk or feed himself or choose his own clothes. (He doesn’t even know what clothes are.) But he is a stone-cold expert in joy. He is world class, five star, Olympic level in the joy stakes. He does joy better than all the grown-ups, except possibly for those very evolved Tibetan monks who seem to have the trick of bone-deep merriment.

The second point is that I don’t think we lose joy, ever. I think my podcasting person chose exactly the right word when he said it was elusive for him. I think what happens is that it gets lost and buried in a whole load of life clutter – in the rubble of heartbreak and playing by the rules and listening to the Shoulds. In all the losses and all the rejections and all the societal imperatives and all the tragedies and all the small rubs of disappointment and failure. And I think maybe we humans fall into error and think we don’t know how to do it, or that it’s not that important anyway, or that we’ve had our quota, or some such not-true thing.

What The Place of Peace does is help to sweep all that clutter out of the way. It reduces the non-necessary suffering. It stops the non-useful and non-correct stories and lets us put away the old survival mechanisms – the ones that no longer serve us – and gentles and understands the critical voices in our heads. Then, we can see the joy, and feel it, and step into it. That small, simple thing we did when we were tiny children comes once again to the surface and is available to us.

And why does that matter? Well, for lots of reasons. But here are the two which I love the most.

If I can access joy, then I’m a nicer, more contented, more infectiously merry person to be around, and all the dogs and horses and humans in my life get to benefit from that.

And it’s intensely good for my nervous system, because I have less cortisol and more serotonin and I’m less likely to develop ulcers or heart disease at an early age and I won’t be a burden on the NHS and I’ll still be able to pick up the dung when I am old.

I will be eighty, and pick up the dung, and laugh while I’m doing it. And surely that is an ambition – literal or metaphorical – which we can all share.

You’ll find more of Tania’s lovely postings here.

“Just say Yes” is a category that I established waaayyy back as an antidote to the crappy things we see happening.