Anam Cara

There is a story that my brother told me about a pub near us at home. You would never get a lift going to the pub if you wanted to get there. You would go to a little village in order to get back. He was driving home one evening and he was passing this man who was going in the direction he was driving in, so he said, “Will you sit in, John?” and John said, “No. Even though I’m walking this way, I’m going the other way!” It is a good metaphor for the false direction that masquerades as power and as achievement in contemporary culture. A lot of that is misdirected, and we need to steady ourselves and have a look at where we actually are. I really believe that age depends on temperament, rather than on time. I know people who at twenty-six and twenty-seven with the gravity that is around them, the seriousness, the lack of any little bit of spring or wildness in them are really about ninety! I know people of seventy, eighty and even eighty-five years who have the minds of seventeen-year-olds! They never managed to get old at all! For some strange reason, the passionate heart never ages, and if you keep your eros and your passion alive, then in some subtle, inevitable way, you are already in the eternal world. Several years ago I wrote a poem called “Cottage.” It is about time and the fact that we don’t recognize the days that we have; and part of the lack of integration in our lives is that we feel they don’t recognize us either—

Cottage

I sit, alert

behind the small window

of my mind and watch

the days pass,

strangers,

who have no reason

to look in.

From Echoes of Memory

LONELINESS

I think that it is impossible for a human to be lonely. I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but the example I would give is when I left Connemara and lived in Germany for four and a half years. I was a bit shocked at first because I knew Connemara very well and I was very close to the humans there, and suddenly when I was in Germany in an apartment on my own, it was utterly solitary. If you want to get away from humans, and you want to be really on your own, Germany is a great place to go! The people don’t bother you at all—if they want to come and visit you they will ring you up beforehand. What struck me was the dual nature of the mind, the inner companionship of yourself. When you say “Hello” to someone, you are breaking in to a conversation they are always having with themselves. So we are always actually in permanent dialogue with ourselves, and therefore solitude is a very rich time. It is the purification of that dialogue. I think what happens in loneliness is that we panic; we somehow see ourselves as isolated and distant from others, and then we really feel abandoned. And there are a lot of people very lonely because they are literally abandoned. Nobody cares about them. There are a lot of other people in relationships, in connection, who are cared for and loved, and they still feel lonely. That is their own responsibility. They feel self-pity, or they feel obsessed with themselves, whereas if they let the rhythm of their solitude run and trusted it, they would be grand. I have learned myself painfully that you can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude. Old age puts you right into confrontation with that possibility, opens it up to you and calls on you to trust and to honor the eternal thing that maybe has been sleeping within you.

LIBERATION

Old age is a time of great freedom. One of the things that militates against freedom for most humans is the weight of responsibility—all they have to do, and their constant obsession with the current project and with the project of life. If there are people depending on you, you have made your responsibilities and you are on the go all the time. You have a whole barrage of expectations coming towards you. You are part of a system or a network which is coming towards you as well, and you have so little space and so little free time for who you really are, for what you would really love to do, for what really deeply concerns you. That is why an awful lot of people in contemporary culture postpone their real lives until they retire.