There is a lot we don’t understand about each other, male, female and non-binary, black and brown and white, Indigenous and immigrant, LGBTQI and cis, able and differently abled, and there are many, many stories we need to hear from people who have been kept down, controlled, silenced or pushed to the perimeter and locked in there. We are not all equally vulnerable when incarceration, suicide and mortality rates can be so firmly determined by the colour of your skin. I am acutely aware, as Maxine Beneba Clarke, author of The Hate Race, pointed out to me, that if she were to write a letter to her children after surviving a lifetime of racist abuse and bullying, in a society where racism is deeply embedded in its systems and institutions, it would be markedly different to my own. With every day we walk on this earth, we must try to understand better, and act to ensure that every person can feel fully human, equal and free. And we must remember what it is we share: that we are born naked and remain naked before fate, which can be a cruel and tasteless bitch. But we can also grow by the light of the moon.
And we must remember, too, that even when we are broken, we have a chance to rebuild ourselves anew. There is nothing stronger, Hannah Gadbsy said, ‘than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself’. In Japan ceramicists repair broken pottery with gold, silver or platinum, in a process called kintsugi or kintsukuroi. They do this to make the fractured object more beautiful than it was before, to honour the cracks, dignify the scars and not hide them. The possibility of death might be locked up in each moment, but so is the possibility of rebirth. Or, at the very least, revamping.
SO WHAT DO I know about rebirth or revamping, or about anything? Not much. Lived in a couple of cities, raised a couple of kids, wrote a couple of books, had several surgeries, made a million mistakes. All I offer is some thoughts. And in all of this exploring, I do not entirely agree with T.S. Eliot that we come to the beginning to find ourselves again. After all this exploring, we should be gazing steadily outwards, beginning to find others again and the brilliance of the world outside our doors.
What it all comes down to, for me, is attention. Simone Weil wrote that ‘absolutely unmixed attention is prayer’ and she was right. A prayer of care, intent, affection and presence.
So much of what is broadly called wellness now involves an expensive kind of burrowing into our selves, wobbling on the plank between self-care and self-obsession. Many get lost in the labyrinth of internal observation, an endless cycle of maintenance of muscle, mood and self-medication.
What is crucial for calm is not just a capacity to empty minds of nonsense but to also fill them with good and marvellous things, with a care for others. There is a reason the great philosophical traditions tell us to cultivate attentiveness to the burdens and struggles of people who live alongside us. The Dalai Lama said: ‘When tragedy or misfortune comes our way, as they surely must . . . if we can shift our focus away from self and toward others, we experience a freeing effect.’
We need to pay attention not just to suffering around us, but to good, and to beauty. (Like my favourite verse in the Bible, Phillipians 4:8: ‘Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.’) What if we can fight distraction not by emptying our minds but by focusing them, so that the mind becomes mind-full, and we find focus, absorption, immersion in something other than ourselves?
Attention is the greatest commodity of the digital age. We pay people to free up our own attention — to freeze our screens, remove our devices, evaporate our clouds, force our heads to focus on the present. We employ people to get us to pay attention to our children, our immediate environment, the trees outside our windows, to our lives, to tell us to stop and breathe, look up not down. We have become toddlers of attention.
We can learn much from artists. After all, what poets and artists, painters and writers and other creative people do is pay attention. Simone Weil saw paying attention as ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity’; Iris Murdoch considered it a moral act. The intensely observant Helen Garner is almost rigid with attention. She told Richard Fidler how ‘intensely interesting’ life is, and that it is an antidote to depression. ‘How can you not want to be out there amongst all this stuff? It’s so enlivening and moving and funny.’ Depression, she says, is when you don’t care about any of that anymore, when you are trapped in your own head.
Mary Oliver, in her poem ‘The Summer Day’ (aka ‘The Grasshopper’), observes a grasshopper eating sugar out of her hands, in a moment of serene, acute observation, the kind where the world slows around you as you focus intently on one object. In this moment, she truly sees the grasshopper, masticating and carrying out its ablutions with minute limbs. In doing so, she witnesses something millions would miss. She then writes that while she does not know exactly what a prayer is, she does know how to pay attention:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
I BECAME OBSESSED WITH phosphorescence when writing this book, and became determined to swim in it, or at least see it, somehow hunt it down. It is, however, remarkably hard to observe: you can never predict when it is going to occur in the ocean and it usually lasts only a few hours or days — despite the fact that, startlingly, three-quarters of all sea creatures have ‘bioluminescence capability’. I packed my wetsuit when I went to Hobart in the hope that my jellyfish-loving friend Lisa-Ann Gershwin might be able to show me some hidden spots. She tried, but we had no luck, and stood disconsolately in the dark throwing pebbles into the sea. All we saw were massive piles of creepy-looking crown-of-thorns starfish, a pest that is thriving in Tasmanian waters and choking parts of the Great Barrier Reef. Lisa-Ann came with me to the airport and promised she would call me the very moment she heard of any local occurrences, so that I could drop everything and fly down.
I fruitlessly put a call out on Twitter. I joined Bioluminescence Australia on Facebook and found myself trawling images of glowing ghost mushrooms in remote forests, firefly larvae in Cambodia and sweeps of neon blue water in Jervis Bay, late into the night. I watched David Attenborough’s documentary Life that Glows repeatedly. I dreamt of phosphorescence. I longed for it. But I could not find it. The coastlines were quiet.
Then, one day, I was walking down to the ferry, wheeling my bags, on my way to the Garma Festival in North Arnhem Land, when I fell into step with a woman called Claire, whose face I recognised from my swimming club. She is part of the tiny group known as ‘The Crazies’ who swim in the dark before dawn, leaving the shore at 5.30 am. We grabbed seats on the ferry and she turned to me and said: ‘It’s been incredible this week, there’s been this phosphorescence and I have never seen anything like it, even though I’ve been swimming in the bay for years.’