Following the signs
A toe-dip into spirituality.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve had religion on my mind. It started when I sat down to watch this new show on Netflix by Dan Buettner called Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, hoping that something nice and wholesome might make my post-festival blues subside a little. I had almost danced myself to death the weekend before and was certainly feeling it in my ageing bones.
I ended up watching the whole show because seeing these hundred-year-olds, so full of life really started to bring me back to life too. I felt buoyed by the fact that, like them, I already eat lots of fruits and veggies and beans, that I have loving relationships, an exercise routine and a sense of purpose (most of the time).
But one of the key characteristics of a Blue Zone, as well as eating well and having friends and moving your body, was being rooted in a faith-based community. It doesn’t matter what the denomination is, but according to Buettner, going to 4 faith-based services per month can add 4 to 14 (fourteeeeen!!!) years to your life. And I can see how this might be so — from the support, friendship and community that a church can provide to the shared set of values that guide you through life.
A couple of days later, I picked up a book called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by two fellows called Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I must be in some kind of crisis picking up a self-help book, which I never usually do, but it’s actually quite good. Anyway, Burnett and Evans are both designers, Stanford professors, and one of them is ex-Apple, and the premise of the book is all about using design thinking to create a better, more fulfilling, happier life for yourself.
In the very first exercise, you are asked to fill in a set of gauges — Work, Love, Play, and Health — so that you can better understand where you are satisfied in life right now and where there is room for improvement. For the Health gauge, my initial thought was that I pretty much deserved full marks, but as I read further, I had to stop and think for a second:
“When you think about health, we suggest you think about more than just a good checkup at the doctor’s. A well-designed life is supported by a healthy body, an engaged mind, and often, though not always, some form of spiritual practice. By “spiritual” we don’t necessarily mean religious. We call spiritual any practice that is based on a belief in something bigger than ourselves.”
Hmm, my second sign.
Since this was an exercise in reflection and not just some guy talking at me through my TV, it really got my mind into gear, thinking about what Spirituality might mean to me, how I might find it, and what flavour of it could realistically work in the context of my life.
Conventional religion just wouldn’t be right. Speaking with my grandma (hi Gran!) over the phone a few weeks ago she said:
“You kids are all so free these days. You’re just not worried about doing the wrong thing for fear of burning in hell like we were when I was young. It was just rubbish!”
Not exactly a call over to Catholicism, as lovely as the singing can be. A stance I think many have taken in the past few decades, shifting away from Christian-esque beliefs but not towards anything in particular. Unless you count worship at the altar of Capitalism, sacrifices to the Gods of the Algorithm, and targeted ads as the new signs of the Heavens — but that’s not a mind spiral I need to get into right now.
Then there’s the more new-age stuff. The practices that all look so calming and grounding and lovely, but that have pretty much been plucked straight from indigenous traditions and histories. Traditions that were once smothered by — dare I say it — colonialism, only to be dug back up and repackaged for the wellbeing of the West.
Indigenous ways of doing and being are inspiring in so many ways, but to simply see a practice over there and think “That looks good, I’ll try that” seems a bit misplaced and kind of ineffective. The power of these rituals lies in their connection to place and ancestry. Burning Palo Santo on the British Isles doesn’t actually make any sense when the stuff doesn’t even grow here. It smells more like appropriation than anything else and that’s not really what I’m after. Not when where I live is itself an ancient place, filled with its own magic. Magic that I may just need to spend time finding.
Speaking with my sister Zara the other day about all this, she said, “It’s not like you don’t have any spirituality. You definitely believe in something!” And she’s right — I believe in vegetables and trees and water and birds and soil and flowers and bees. So maybe that’s where I should start, leaning into the calm I feel when I walk through a forest, or the cleansing I feel when I swim in seas and lakes and rivers and ponds, or the life I feel with a belly full of broccoli. Thinking about it now, maybe I’ve already found my religion, and it started with learning the names of the trees in the park near my house.
Last night, after an afternoon spent paddling around the Kenwood Ladies Pond, relishing the cool waters, and chewing my friend Linsey’s ear off about this very topic, I came across my third sign — a line in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass that said, “so long ago, the people were told that it is their spiritual lives that will keep them strong.”
It jumped right out at me, perhaps because the message was so aligned with this weeks-long mental journey I’ve just been on, and it made me flip back a few pages to another line that I had underlined in green pen. Together, they felt like hands on my back, pushing me along, off in the right direction. The line that I had underlined seems like a nice place to finish, so here it is:
“When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are”.
Doesn’t that seem like the universe is trying to tell me something?
See you in the next one,
Annabel
I know this topic can be quite contentious, so I’d love to hear your thoughts if you are keen to share them. Either in the comments or privately.
Also, sorry this is a day late.
Jon Kabat-Zinn “Wherever you go, there you are”!