An extract from Wise Traveller: Happiness

Life sometimes feels like a slow death – a seeping drowning, weighing me down by increments until I gasp for breath within a whirlpool of deadlines and expectations. And we call this ‘earning a living'! I want to be truly alive, not striving for some dream existence that always seems to loiter on an elusive horizon.

Once, on a train, I travelled with a monk. I wondered how he could live with so few possessions and so many rules; and yet I found him gloriously free – liberated to be himself, happy with himself, truly alive and free to give back to life the gifts it had given him, freely offering that spark of life to me.

When I was a child life seemed simple, pressures were few and the summers endless. There was ample time to play, to be, to wonder, to be alive in each moment. I am travelling back to my childhood now. Taking a journey into a limitless landscape of simple contentment.

As I walk the old familiar route to my private room I choose to let slip my worldly cares; today there will be no diary, no computer, TV or phone. Alone I will seek the truth in my own simplicity, touched by what I encountered on that other journey; in my own way to wear a monk's habit and find a peace I have not known before.

All is quiet, all is still. Here there is nothing and yet everything. ‘In your cell you will discover all there is to know', the brother had told me. And here perhaps all is found: myself; the world; being itself uncovered; God himself… In the solitude we are together, truly alive.

Steve Hollinghurst

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