hermits – Notes from the Far Beyond

Conformity

and the price of locking step

The Longships Rocks, with the Isles of Scilly Behind

There are two routes to the farm where I live, and they are shown on online maps. The problem is, one route is easy and good, and if you follow the other – as recommended on satnavs – then you’re likely to lose your exhaust pipe and damage your car, unless it’s a Land Rover.

We’ve tried to get the satnav people to change the instructions, but they won’t do it. They look at a satellite photo and see a road there, without knowing what its surface is like. So they even disbelieve evidence that we, who live here, send them – because the satellite says there’s a road there. Well, at your peril.

So when people come to visit, I send a map and instructions but some rather slavishly follow their satnav. They trust it more than they should, because it tells them what to do. As a result, they arrive late, flustered, after having made a few extra phone calls to me to find out the way. That cuts down our time together.

This highlights a big problem in our time. Many people – even quite aware ones, and even those who otherwise distrust a lot of things handed down to them from the corporate and governmental world – believe and obey what we are told. We set aside our own thoughts, experience, finer judgement and intuition, because the instructions say that we ought to follow this route, not that.

Precarity at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall

But if the satellite system breaks down (almost inevitable sometime), and if we lose our map-reading skills and intuitions, then we’ll get lost. Not only with finding the way, but also because we’re addicted to obeying orders. We all do it, in varying degrees! Even if you are a dissenter, an ‘alternative type’, or a sensitive soul, there will be areas of life where you snap to and do what you’re told, even at a price.

Even with conspiracy thinking, there’s an element in it where people disagreeing with the ‘official line’ transfer all their need for certainties to other things they’re told by other people, who sound as if they know what they’re talking about, and uncritically they follow a new set of rules.

One of my bugbears is typical: we are told that mobile phones and wi-fi are safe and okay, and we are addicted to all that phones have brought us (it’s an amazing technology). Yet, just consult your feelings, consult your body and your psyche, and something is not right. This radiation is changing you. It changed my life – I have a cancer caused by radiation, and when I mention this to others, or when I walk out of a room because I can’t handle being in the company of six phones with humans attached to them, there’s often an awkward silence. Ooops, I’ve said something wrong. If I mention the effects this has on nature, the world’s climate and on earth energy and subtle energies, most people just don’t want to know – even if they’re nature-lovers. Yet this is suicidal. And you don’t need a PhD to understand that.

We all do this. It arises from the fear that “I do not have the knowledge, authority and whatever else it takes to cut my own line through life“. This is the way that the Megamachine retains control – through imposing a fear of what might happen if you don’t obey, through telling us what’s right and what’s wrong, infantilising us and making us conform.

In the end, this is not about Them – it’s about Us. It’s about our deepest psychology – profoundly stilted and stunted by fear, guilt and shame, the big blockers of inner progress and of correction of the world’s ills.

We all do it – I do too.

I did this last year. I was accused of being a narcissist. Bewildered and feeling at a loss, I took it upon myself and carried that for about nine months, feeling bad. It was a burden of guilt – my own guilt from the past. Not about being a narcissist, but simply about feeling inadequate and flawed.

But I was bewildered and confused about it too. Perhaps I am a narcissist? Perhaps the person who put that on me was right.

But then, a good friend came along and grilled me – she could see I was unhappy and weighed down with it. She had experience of this, having been a ‘victim’ of a narcissist herself. Though she pointed out how a victim is part of the equation too. She questioned me about what had happened, saying in the end, “Hang on, it wasn’t you – it was the other person. The actual behaviour of a narcissist was displayed not by you but by the other person, and this was projected on you”.

Now this was a big revelation. Suddenly a weight started falling off my shoulders. It was like a forgiveness. It didn’t just dissolve the issue – it gave me a new perspective. It allowed me to look at the narcissistic tendencies within me – after all, I do like standing on stages, and I’m what Facebook would label a ‘public figure’. Part of me is shy and a hermit, and part of me loves attention. So there’s stuff to take ownership of here, and it has helped me understand much about my life.

I’ve always been something of a reluctant leader. There’s pain in my psyche over matters of power. But this has made me focus on ‘right leadership’. The world does need leaders, but of a certain kind. In my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations, in a chapter about power and legitimacy, I give three quotes.

Rioters and vandals at the Oak Dragon Camp

“A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.” – Georges Pompidou, French prime minister, in 1973.

“You can erect a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long.” – Boris Yeltsin, Russian president, in 1991 (Mr Putin, take note!).

“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947.

These photos of me are by Claudia Caolin

This concerns right leadership. In my life I’ve learned a lot about this, and the question still continues. I’ve often felt like a monarch without a kingdom, a bishop without a church and a professor without a university – and this has been my karma in this life. It concerns service. It’s a big question for Virgos like me: the difference between service and slavery.

Service is willing, intentional and conscious. Slavery is reluctant, grudging and involuntary. Slavery is about resorting to type, conforming to what we feel is expected of us by those who seem to know better, and doing our best to avoid punishment.

If you’re going to be a shining star in the public firmament, then rightly or wrongly you need to fulfil what you feel are people’s needs and expectations. In this context, staying in power starts becoming more important.

The matter of staying in power is a difficult one. It’s not just a form of corruption and powermongery. It might be the case that, in a position of power, you actually are the best person for the job – it’s arguable that Mr Putin was the best for the job 10-20 years ago, and many a strongman is like that. But then your star starts falling and times start changing – Xi Jin Ping will experience this in coming years. The tide goes out on you, as it does.

But if you’re good at what you do, then you’re faced with the possibility that the person or the oligarchy that replaces you could actually be worse. I’ve faced this myself. Many people who rail at leaders are, frankly, covertly envious. Watching things that I’ve started deteriorate in others’ hands has been a big and painful lesson to me, bringing me back to a difficult truth: while holding onto power is not advisable, letting go of it can also be problematic.

It comes down to our motivation, and to being honest, often while standing in the spotlight in the ‘court of public opinion’, ruthless as it sometimes can be. Remember the British politician Paddy Ashdown? When he was caught with his pants down he owned up immediately – and everyone thought, “Good on you, Paddy – at least you’re honest”. Meanwhile, others were caught with pants down but they went into denial – they were clearly ‘in office but not in power’.

Tony Blair then came along – he looked like a clean pair of hands. But Tony, after a few years of doing some pretty good things, himself made a classic error – he sucked up to the big guys and took Britain into the Iraq war, when most people in Britain knew this wasn’t right. He sucked up to the Americans and PNAC, a cabal of believers in ‘The New American Century’, which now, chaps like Putin and Xi are showing to be empty and hubristic – America was being what Chairman Mao once called a ‘paper tiger’. Hm, fatal error, Tony – and he’s paid a price for it.

It’s all in the motivation. When I was a young acid head revolutionary in a former millennium, I realised then that it wasn’t just a question of replacing one evil system with another, whether through revolution or reform. It concerned the hearts and minds of the people actually sitting in seats of power. No one system has The Answer. No system is perfect.

Democracy has big problems, and we cannot say that our democratic governments truly represent what the people of our countries need. But autocracies like China and ‘managed democracies’ like Turkiye, though at times they can deliver the goods, have their problems too. It’s all to do with the matter of succession.

Some people moan about our king, here in Britain, but would an elected president and House of Lords really be a better solution? Hmmm, that’s questionable. King Charles III, well, you might or might not like him, but he’s okay, actually, as a person. Though his limited and mainly moral power is inherited, he happens to be an interesting person, and his son isn’t bad either – compared with what we could have.

I remember standing on stage at the Glastonbury Festival in the early 1980s, saying, as an astrologer, that Prince William, born during the festival during an eclipse, would be an interesting character as a future monarch. And he is likely to be so. Do we want to get rid of this guy and his missus?

Why do we expect perfection of our leaders? Why do Americans place so much belief in their elected presidents when they have lots of evidence that such belief is futile? Why do we continue electing the same old political parties, even when we’re disappointed in them?

I remember in 2005, many Palestinians asked me, “Why, after you had the biggest demonstrations in British history against the Iraq War, did you re-elect Tony Blair a third time?”. Well the answer was, “Because he’s still better than the other lot”. Twenty years on, that’s why quite a few people might vote for Biden or a clone of him – because of the other lot.

That’s the dilemma of democracy – it gives us second-best solutions. It is based not on consensus and agreement but on argument and dissension, meaning that 49% of the population land up dissatisfied, unhappy to support their government. Actually, through the quirks of our supposed constitution here in Britain, Margaret Thatcher only ever really achieved about 25% support of the whole electorate, even at the peak of her power. Is that democracy?

Sometimes you just have to stand on your own – a baby swallow on our farm

Well, it’s a common quirk of majoritarian democracy. In some countries, we vote for a plethora of parties, and then the biggest, or not even the biggest, cobbles together a coalition that might not at all resemble what voters wanted – as Israelis have discovered. It relies on conformity and grudging acceptance of bad political outcomes – AND we, the public, customarily disunited, then fail to support our governments wholeheartedly, even when we vote them into power.

The result is that it’s a recipe for failure, because someone somewhere is always opposing it. So this concerns the responsiveness of political systems to public need. And, besides, it isn’t democratic governments that really decide things: such governments exist to ease the cruel grating between the priorities of the Megamachine (the apparently ‘free’ market), and the needs of The People (whoever we truly are).

It’s all down to right leadership and right use of power. But that’s difficult, because sitting in the power seat is not comfortable, and it’s a 20 hour a day job, under a lot of pressure, and subject to cruel judgements from the public – witness those promising leaders, many of them women, who choose not to sit in that seat because it’s painful to get exposed to the sheer negativity of the commentariat and people on the street who land up even hating you.

So, if we want good leadership, we need to treat our leaders with greater empathy and support, remembering that they actually are human beings, with sensitivities. And we need leaders with human sensitivities. But we need also to hold them to account. We need them to change when they get things wrong.

It doesn’t always work to jettison old leaders and put new leaders in place – it can lead to a cycle of deterioration where we get leaders who are either bombastic and imposing, or leaders who say one thing and do another, or they make it sound as if they’re doing things when actually nothing is changing at all.

In fact, it might be valuable sometimes to welcome back old leaders – to give Theresa May or Tony Blair a second chance. Why? Because they’ve had a period in the wilderness, a time to think things over, and they might well have a deep need, in later life, to get things right. Well, perhaps. Second-term presidents can be a bit like that. They don’t want to go down in history for the wrong thing.

Anyway, so I might well be a narcissist. It’s a convenient accusation to make, for which one is guilty unless proven innocent – but even then one might not be believed. Just to be suspected is enough to ruin a person’s life. What’s needed here is owning up, in public, and self-correction.

Mistakes are allowed. Learn first time round and you’re doing alright. Learn second time round and you have a problem but it might be excusable. Leave it to third time round and you have a deeper issue going on, and it’s best to go – whatever his merits, Boris Johnson got to that point.

Human error. There’s accountability and there is forgiveness. Just because someone fucked up, it doesn’t necessarily mean they should be blacklisted – it means they need to self-correct, and genuinely so. And everyone, everyone, is a mixed bag – yes, even Bill Gates, who does both some questionable things and some laudable things (and, as an Aspie, he also has an exaggerated capacity to be misunderstood).

So, it might be that I’m a narcissist. To be honest, I really do not know, and it’s up to people’s own judgement. It has caused the person who accused me to completely cut off all contact and unfriend me, perhaps obeying the strictures of a famous psychologist in Canada who says that the only way to deal with narcissists is to cut off all contact.

Standing there for 2,500 years and not going anywhere

Well, I experience that to be rather cruel, actually, throwing out both the baby and the bathwater. I sincerely hope the accuser was right, because otherwise this fierce separation was a very destructive strategy. I’ve learned a lot from it and, for my sins, I now live in glorous isolation, and that’s my karma and life-lesson, and on some level there’s something good about it. Because, for better or worse, it enables me to write yardages of verbiage to you lot, and I sincerely hope it’s useful!

Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans. In the end, there is no right or wrong – there are simply outcomes. And life is for the learning. So, whatever my fuckups, I’d like to be remembered at least for trying to redeem those fuckups and make things good. But there are some who would even question whether I’m getting anywhere with that.

In the end, it’s necessary to listen and to take in the feedback that people, life and its learning experiences give us. But not too much, because otherwise we become guilty of another crime – the crime of holding back our gifts, believing that someone else can do it better. However, if it’s a gift, it’s highly unlikely. The secret lies somewhere between taking a stand and keeping your antennae up.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk
www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Aloneness

Latest podcast

When I was doing the design work for these podcasts, this one came close but didn’t quite make it.

This podcast is all about… Aloneness.

I had rather a debate and struggle about what to blog or podcast about next. So I decided to drop it and go up the hill on our farm to sit on the bronze age barrows up there and have a good think. Or a non-think. Those barrows have energy and I go there for an energy-bath.

On the way up I had an encounter with our big thumping bull. He’s great – he’s not a threat, but he’s definitely worthy of respect.

The whole of his herd of wives and children was spread across the field. Often they’re mainly to one side, so I go up the other side. But today it wasn’t possible, and the bull was right in the middle, staring at me.

We eyeballed each other. I let him hear the sound of my voice. Since we both have low voices we can read each other quite well. He grunted. We both wondered what to do. It took a while but we weren’t in a hurry. This was contemplation of the scene rather than anxious concern, for both of us. I decided to take an initiative, slowly heading uphill toward the left and, fascinatingly, as soon as I started moving he lumbered off to the right. We had both had the same thought.

As soon as he starts moving the whole herd starts moving. Belted Galloways, they’re a real herd, this lot, socially as well as genetically. So they shambled over into the next field. They have a big ranging ground all over Botrea Hill, with organic pasture and wild moor. I staggered uphill on my sticks toward the badger sett – a big, old and mature sett that apparently has been there for centuries.

On top of Botrea Hill. One of the barrows is in the background – low, wide and rather rain-eroded now. It’s not exactly exciting up there, but 4,000 years ago this would have been pleasant grassland, with a fantastic all-round view.

Further on, up on the barrows, I lay there absorbing the sun, connecting my heart and solar plexus into the earth and letting my psyche float free. Then I turned over and opened up my aura to the heavens, drifting off somewhere. Came to, had a drink, fired up my sound recorder (a Japanese Zoom H4N Pro) and suddenly realised I was going to talk about aloneness and loneliness. Out it came. This is it.

I have a feeling some Far Beyond listeners will relate to this podcast quite personally. Loneliness falls on all of us at times in life, but it falls heavily nowadays on certain people – it’s a hole you can fall into and get stuck in, getting so accustomed to your own company that you start losing interest in normal social interactions. It’s insidious.

That’s weird, considering the world’s population is at its highest ever. That’s about social isolation, even alienation.

But we have a new issue today: you can be physically alone for much of the time but well-connected remotely over internet with loads of people. Online home-workers can get isolated – not just grannies and the disabled. As a book editor, I would take 2-3-4 weeks over each book, with little need to talk to anyone for that time – I specialised in tricky, intricate books that demanded a lot of editorial thought. This online connectivity is both a blessing and a sad symptom of the way we moderns have adopted a surrogate digital life.

I too use this medium as a way of overcoming isolation, and this podcast is an example. Though this highlights one of the points I make in the podcast: it’s possible to turn even loneliness to good use.

You can listen on Spotify
or on my website at www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
and it’s also on Apple and Google Podcasts.

This is an old part of the badger sett. Top-left you can see the runway into a new hole they’ve dug out. Badgers are very clean, and they keep their property spruce and tidy.

Doing the Work

About what I’m working on right now

The known ancient sites of Cornwall. See it in more detail.

I’m on an astrological transit called Neptune opposition Saturn, and one symptom of this is aloneness. This is a life-pattern of mine, both a blessing and a bane. Much of my greatest work, in terms of studies and writing, has emerged during times of isolation and adversity – as if I’ve been given a perverse gift of extended time in which the only thing I can do is the work.

Kinda serving time – but there’s a double-entendre to that term. I’m a saturnine type, and that’s what it’s about – fulfilling the agreement, the covenant, as best I can. And Saturn says to each and every one of us, each in our own way: you can do it now and there will be consequences, or you can do it later with other consequences, but you will do it – and the easier path is to take what appears to be the harder path (though it isn’t harder in the end).

Writing a book, building a website or doing research… most other options become mysteriously unavailable when it’s time to do one of these. But not forever, and the window shuts if I don’t seize the time, even when I just have potatoes to eat.

But then, that’s one of my best contributions and people benefit from it, and if I sat around chatting, socialising or treading the money-mill I wouldn’t be doing it and it wouldn’t happen. Cos it takes hours, days, months and years, and a life’s work takes a life to do (sometimes longer).

So the current fiddly operation I’m on right now is tweaks to the ancient sites maps of Cornwall that I’ve been doing for the last six years. This time I’m looking at ancient site alignments coming from Dartmoor and Exmoor in Devon into Cornwall. Bodmin Moor acts as a kind of hub for incoming alignments, though some pass through it. It’s amazing, the accuracy with which these alignments cross quite long distances of up to 100km, hitting ancient sites within just a few metres.

One remarkable thing is this. I was reluctant to get involved with Devon (too much work), but I chose a few sites, such as Berry Head and Start Point, and found some amazing alignments. More recently I decided (after procrastinating) to add key sites in Dartmoor to the map (takes about 5-10 minutes per site) – and fascinatingly, some of those sites appeared exactly on the alignments I had already found. Amazing. How they did this without satellites, I do not know (though I have a few theories).

That’s Bartinney, as seen from the 2,000 year old iron age courtyard house up on Botrea Hill

It’s in gradual progress – but (if you wish) check out those alignments from Berry Head, Torbay, and Start Point – one goes all the way to Bartinney Castle, just on the other side of the valley and visible when I look up from my desk. As I write in my forthcoming book, if you wanted to land a mothership in West Penwith, that’d be the place.

I have to do the uploads from a non-public ‘sandbox’ map of Cornwall to the public maps late at night, since many people will (hopefully) be in bed, and their visits to the maps won’t get disrupted as the maps blink on and off, one layer at a time as each layer is replaced, tweaked and twooked. Well, that’s how it gets late at night… it takes about three hours.

The latest upload happened last night. I was buzzing on Dexamethasone at the time – a legal and free cancer drug, just like meditation, but fundamentally different and prescribed by different sources). But Dex helps me get a few things done, in the two days I’m taking it.

So you’ll find the current stage of this research here:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer…

There’s one more thing… no one can take away your life’s work from you. If you feel they are doing that, then you have a short-term, not a longterm problem and the value of the experience is to confirm that it’s right to get on with it somehow, and to oblige you to get right behind it.

Whatever is going on in your life, your life’s work goes with you on a somewhat separate track, fed by and feeding through to things that happen to you, or books you read, or people who deliver prompts and clues. Withholding and hanging back on our life’s work is one of the great causes of the global problems we have today. It’s also a cause of future illness.

I’m not a great withholder, but cancer put the cards on the table and told me: there’s more, and it’s time. Part of me doesn’t care so much about how my ideas and initiatives are received any more – though of course I do care a lot, but not for the same reasons as before. So I’m getting down many of the threads I’ve pursued in life, for the record, because I’ve been privileged to live through a pretty exciting and edgy time, and I’ve shared this with so many good people. It’s worth leaving tracks, whether or not future generations know or care whose shoulders they’re standing on. Because human history and the passing of the generations simply eats us for breakfast and dissolves us into nothingness.

Even those of whom history thinks well are often remembered for weird and often incorrect reasons. Once upon a time, on Iona, I had an inner dialogue with the soul of St Columba, a founder of monasteries and evangelist for the faith, looked on as a shining light of former times. Not so – he was a murderer and completely screwed up in Ulster, got out, saw the light, and did all that from guilt and a sense of penance. He disliked the way he is remembered.

Similarly with Salah-ad-Din, regarded as a great and just Kurdish ruler of Syria and Egypt. He had offered a power-sharing arrangement in Palestine that would have changed future history, and the Crusaders (Richard the Lionheart) didn’t take it. (It wasn’t helped by the fact that his son and a rich European lady, who would be required to marry to guarantee the treaty, didn’t want to.) He didn’t like that. He got the Crusaders out of Jerusalem and penned them up in Acre, but then, tired of campaigning against assholes and wanting to complete the job, he made a fatal error, causing many deaths. He died, heartbroken, not long after. What he remembers of that life is not the same as what many remember today.

So much for posterity.

Love, Paldywan

Grazias, Shukran

Thanks everyone, for your comments.

This is a note I posted on Facebook in response to feedback about this blog.

Neolithic placed stones on Zennor Hill, here in Cornwall

Thanks everyone, for your comments. While the compliments are heartening, what I find most interesting is the variety of ways my blogs go ding and clang with different readers in differing ways. That’s just fascinating.

With these blogs I don’t really have a clear intention. I’m just trying to record things that come up along the strange path of being a cancer patient with twiggling antennae and a lot of time on my hands to reflect, look at things from one step back, and to use my wordsmithing skills to try to squeeze them into written lines of verbiage.

Believe me, when I was young I struggled hard to write down my artesian aspie thoughts, and it took a long while – decades.

This is one of those things about living on Earth – stuff doesn’t come easily and we have to work at it. We have to serve time, slogging through loadsa shite to get really good at things. This is a key part of our soul-honing process and one of the big reasons why each of us chose to come here.

That’s what I’m trying to do. So I have cancer. So my challenge is to get good at cancer, to exploit its openings. Writing this blog is part of my medicine.

I don’t pre-think it. I’ll just sit on it until, one morning, I wake up with a nugget, a starting place – it kinda fizzles – and it comes out of the present. Which is how sometimes you’ll hear about my toilet challenges and other times it’s about meta-cozmickle panoramas.

Thanks for being with, and I’m really glad that the stuff that gets dredged up here brings insights, connects a few things together and reminds you of what you already know – though perhaps put differently so that it can be seen with another optic.

As someone said here, who knows if I am right? That doesn’t matter. What matters is to bounce things around because it helps our seeing, helps us see things from other angles, and it loosens us up.

Actually, I’d be quite glad and relieved to find out I’m wrong in many of the things I say and write, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be allowed that privilege. We shall see.

Palden

Aloneness and Loneliness

This is for people who are alone or feel themselves to be alone. This issue is frequently framed in the terms and perspective of the peopled, while many of the alone tend to be outblasted on this subject by the beliefs of the peopled – the idea that aloneness is something to be rescued from.

Here’s the rub: being alone is not a bad thing. Feeling lonely is difficult, though it also has its gifts. Aloneness and loneliness are two different things: one is a fact and one is a feeling.

Part of me has always been a hermit (the other part public), so I’ve been here, in that aloneness place, many times throughout life, sometimes willingly, sometimes not, and loss has been a big life-issue for me. At present I am alone for about two-thirds of the time and I live in an isolated place, remote from the madding crowd, a place of buzzards, jackdaws and gulls.

Loneliness has various components. One is the feeling of lack of company and closeness – missing people. This is exacerbated when it’s unwilling (as with refugees, people separated by fate or by difficult choices, and the bereaved or alienated). But it can be hard even when chosen. When I moved to the far end of Cornwall I knew that old friends were unlikely to visit me and I miss them, but it was my choice – instead I talk to them in my thoughts or online.

The issue is not just to look at the hard side and judge aloneness in terms of what is lost. Everything in life has its compensations. Sometimes it’s difficult figuring out what we’re gaining from adversity, but it’s important to look at it. A lot of the hardship that we feel involves judgements we impose on ourselves and others’ judgements we take on our shoulders. This has been my story and one consequence is that now, in late life, my backbone has literally given way (as a result of bone marrow cancer) yet this experience has really helped me shed a lot of that psychological load.

I’ve long been an author, editor and online content-creator. To do what I feel called to do, I’ve had to put myself under lockdown many times. When I wrote The Only Planet of Choice in 1992 I was out of sight for 20 months – some people thought I’d moved away! Generally, my self-imposed lockdowns have been regarded as anti-social – as if I’m uninterested in and don’t care about people. But no, if I don’t lock down, how can I do what I’m here for, that people like me for and seem to benefit from? The funny thing is that, writing another book in 2020, suddenly I haven’t been anti-social but doing exactly the right thing! My 2020 lockdown started in October 2019, due to cancer, not Covid.

There’s another aspect to aloneness. Lack of stimulus and interaction can lead to a literal slowing of the psyche. This helps if one needs to unwind from a busy life, but after a longer period it leads to a crisis of energy and orientation. This is happening for many aloners, and it affects the old particularly, and those with long-Covid and fatigue – and prisoners too. I’ve noticed it in myself. I’m pretty creative, and I don’t just sit there, yet I’ve been drying up recently. By degrees. Talking to myself too much.

I overcome this in three main ways: inner journeying, pursuing an interest and going out in nature. Recently I’ve been wading through history books about the Ottomans and the conflicts of the Britons with the Saxons 1,500 years ago – that’s how I get through long hours in bed.

I think inner journeying is important for people who are bedridden or fatigued – and we do it anyway, in our woozy inner meanderings. But it can be done more proactively, and there are methods and ways to encourage it. Make it into a project. You have been given a gift of aloneness that gives you space to do this, and for much of your life you have not had such opportunities. Make a project of your inner musings and wanderings – put it to use.

When you’re alone, it’s really good to get on with activity projects too. I usually have some things that demand thought and focus and some things that are easier or more druderous, some that are creative and some that need some discipline. This is something you can do with your life that has little or nothing to do with other people: it’s yours, and no one can change that.

A solitary time can be the birthplace of something new. All of the big projects I’ve set in motion throughout my life have been conceived when I’m alone. The quiet isolation has given me vision time, inspiration space, healing, resolution, exploration and enrichment of the human in me. This is a choice – a personal one. It’s what Buddhists call a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness.

It often involves coming to peace over many issues. We need to stop beating ourselves up, running ourselves down, diverting ourselves with fear, guilt, shame and self-doubt. These blockers cause us to withhold our talents and gifts. Get this: if you care about this planet and about humanity, then activating your talents and gifts is not a choice but a duty. It’s what you’re here for, to rise to the best of your potential and to make a contribution. Forget should. Do what you can, and creatively, and your way. Whatever that is. That can include things that society or the people around you don’t necessarily deem productive or advisable.

Even if accepting aloneness doesn’t lead to dramatic outcomes, or even if we’re slowly dying, there’s something profound here about coming to peace. We all have regrets, painful memories, shadows from the past. I do too. We need to recognise them, even cherish them, and release them. They do little good, except to teach us what not to do again. Sometimes we can act to redeem these issues with the people concerned and sometimes we cannot.

Even if we cannot, releasing them still, in a funny and mysterious way, relieves the situation with people we no longer even have contact with, or we cannot face, or they might even be dead. In all interactions and conflicts it always, always, takes two to tango, and we can do something about our bit – the emotional tangles within ourselves that have complicated the issue for us and for them. Shed that load. Forgive and be forgiven. Move on.

Then there’s the fear of madness, deep in the Western psyche. Fear that you’re losing the plot, disengaging too much from groupthink and from that safe set of deeply embedded, culturally-defined judgements that were hammered into us as we grew up, about what’s right and wrong. Well, here’s a thought: in my life I have led and been part of hundreds of sharing circles, and it has been clear that many of the most insightful contributions in such circles have come from the quiet ones, the ones who struggle to articulate themselves. The ones who anticipated that they’d be misjudged or they’d say it wrong. But they can bring forth gems that they’ve mulled over very carefully, and sometimes quiet people hold the ace cards.

Quietness and disengagement are not madness, and just because society harps on endlessly about ‘mental health’, it doesn’t mean you ‘have a condition’. You see, society is mad, absolutely insane, and everything is seriously upside-down. Madness simply means that you differ from a mad consensus. You might be on your own with that, except for people who understand you, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is that our world today is steered by people who are so busy and peopled that they don’t know themselves well enough. They don’t have time and space to look at what’s really going on. There’s something in aloneness that allows us to anchor to deeper verities, and the majority or the dominant consensus in society can be based more in hearsay than in reality. This is a global problem. And rural areas (most of the world) are being governed by people in big city buildings.

There’s more to say on all this, but I’ll stop here (my brains are giving out). But here’s a message from old Paldywan Kenobi to friends and strangers out there who are on their own: be alone well. Do your best with it. Exploit its possibilities. This transforms loneliness into an aloneness that is at peace with itself.

Oh, and one more thing. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Lynne, my partner, and I, are together about one-third of the time (she lives two hours’ drive away), and sometimes we miss each other. Yet, sincethis is so, we have an amazing relationship that works really well. For me, aloneness makes those relationships that I do have so much more meaningful. You can be close to people even when you’re far apart, even when you don’t know where they are and what they’re doing.

Sometimes I find myself thinking of a faraway or long-lost friend, having good inner discussions with them, and then, later, I find out they’re already dead! So, with people you love, even if distant or gone, listen, and talk to them inside yourself, because you are together at that time. If anyone accuses you of being mad, just remember, they’re afraid. Afraid of their aloneness, afraid of getting caught out, exiled to the far-off realms of ‘mental illness’.

For the truth is, together or apart, there are light years between all of us. Yet we’re all here together, and this is it. No one is here by accident, and this is what we came for. So if you find yourself alone nowadays, remember, do it well. There are probably a billion souls on Earth who are alone, whether stuffed away in a high-rise or hidden away up a mountain, so you’re in good company.

Okay, I’ll leave you alone now. Time to put the kettle on. Love, Palden.