732-pg

Arriving home after a terrible train journey

398-pg

Being surrounded by nature

1,291-pg

Dancing

1,350-pg

A close relative recovering from an operation

3,982-pg

And so on.

Sri Lanka

I HAD BEEN asked to visit the beautiful fort city of Galle, on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka, to attend the literature festival there and give a talk on mental health. The event was quite special, as Sri Lanka is still a place where talking about mental illness can be taboo. And it was emotional, hearing stories of anxiety and depression and OCD and suicidal tendencies and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in a context where they aren’t normally publicly aired. It was like you could feel stigma evaporating in real time.

But it wasn’t the event I remember, it was the day after. On Hikkiduwa beach, alongside locals and backpackers, feeding giant sea turtles seaweed straight from my hand. Andrea and the children were there. It was the kind of moment I never believed I would have when I was an agoraphobic twentysomething convinced I wouldn’t live to reach 30, having pushed everyone I loved away. Then, at 40, in the Southern Hemisphere, there I was with people I loved, on an idyllic beach, close up to these large ancient reptiles. They seemed so calm and wise in their longevity. I wondered what secret wisdom they had. And wished there was a way for a human to ask a turtle questions.

So, when depression slugs over me I close my eyes and enter the bank of good days and think of sunshine and laughter and turtles. And I try to remember how possible the impossible can sometimes be.

An amphibious approach to life ‘Hello, turtle.’

‘Oh. Hi there.’

‘Any advice on life?’

‘Why are you asking me?’

‘Because you’re a turtle.’

‘And?’

‘Turtles have survived for millions of years. You’ve been around for 157 million years. That’s more than 700 hundred times as long as Homo sapiens have been around. You must know some things, as a species.’

‘You’re conflating length of existence with breadth of knowledge.’

‘It’s just humans who have made a mess of the world. Turtles don’t seem to.’

‘I know. We are near extinction because of you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was using “you” in the plural sense. But also, yes, you.’

‘I know. I’m a human. I share the blame.’

‘Yes. You do.’

‘Yes.’

‘Anyway, if you really want to know, the advice I would give is stop it.’

‘Stop what?’

‘It. The rushing after nothing. Humans seem in such a rush to escape where they are. Why? Is it the air? Does it not hold you up well enough? Maybe you need more time in the sea. I would say: stop it. Don’t just take your time, be your time. Move fast or slow, but be aware you will always take yourself with you. Be happy to paddle in the water of existence.’

‘Right.’

‘Look at my head. It’s tiny. My brain-to-body-mass ratio is embarrassing. But it doesn’t matter, you see. If you take life carefully, you can focus. You can be how you need to be. You can have an amphibious approach to life. You can be at one with the rhythms of the whole earth. The wet and the dry. You can tune in to the wind and the water. You can tune in to yourself. It’s rather wonderful, you know, being a turtle.’

‘I bet. Thanks, turtle.’

‘Now, may I have some more seaweed?’

Reversing the loop ANXIETY IS SELF-PERPETUATING. When you have it in its illness form it is a feedback loop of despair. The only way out is to stop the meta-worry, to stop worrying about the worrying, which is near impossible. Sometimes the trick is to find a reverse kind of loop. I do this by accepting that I am in this state of non-acceptance. By being comfortable with being uncomfortable. By accepting I don’t have control.

A cliché but true: you can’t get to where you want to be without first accepting where you are. The world tries to tell us not to accept ourselves. It makes us want to be richer, prettier, thinner, happier. To want more. When we are ill, this becomes doubly true, and yet this is when we most need to accept ourselves, accept the moment of pain, in order to release it. Slowly release it, into the world from which it came.

The sky is always the sky

JUST NOW I looked out of the window and felt calmer. The moon is a real flirt tonight behind a veil of bruise-blue cloud. This sky is sensational. No photo would catch it.

And this reminded me of something. When I had a long episode of depression about a decade ago, the worst depression I have had since my breakdown in my twenties, one of the few comforts I used to get was looking at the sky. We lived in Yorkshire, and there wasn’t that much light pollution, and so the sky was vast and clear. I’d take the bins out and just look at the night sky and feel myself and my pain getting smaller. I’d stand there for a while breathing the cool air, staring at stars and planets and constellations. I would breathe deeply, as if the cosmos was something you could inhale. I’d sometimes place my hand on my stomach and feel the stuttery flutter of my nervous breathing begin to settle.

I often wondered, and still wonder, why the sky, especially the night sky, had such an effect. I used to think it was to do with the scale. When you look up at the cosmos you can’t help but feel minuscule. You feel the smallness of yourself not only in space but also in time. Because, of course, when you stare into space you are staring up at ancient history. You are staring at stars as they were, not as they are. Light travels. It doesn’t just instantaneously appear. It moves at 186,000 miles per second. Which sounds fast, but also means that light from the closest star to Earth (after the sun) took over four years to get here.

But some of the stars visible to the naked eye are over 15,000 light years away. Which means the light reaching your eye began its journey at the end of the Ice Age. Before humans knew how to farm land. Contrary to popular belief, most of the stars that we see with our eyes are not dead. Stars, unlike us, exist for a very long time. But that adds to, rather than takes away from, the therapeutic majesty of the night sky. Our beautiful but tiny brief role within the cosmos is as that rarest of galactic things: a living, breathing, conscious organism.

When looking at the sky, all our 21st-century worries can be placed in their cosmic context. The sky is bigger than emails and deadlines and mortgages and internet trolls. It is bigger than our minds, and their illnesses. It is bigger than names and nations and dates and clocks. All of our earthly concerns are quite transient when compared to the sky. Through our lives, throughout every chapter of human history, the sky has always been the sky.

And, of course, when we are looking at the sky we aren’t looking at something outside ourselves. We are looking, really, at where we came from. As physicist Carl Sagan wrote in his masterpiece Cosmos: ‘The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.’

The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic. It’s the most wonderful thing. And you need to make like a tree or a bird and just feel a part of the great natural order now and again. You are incredible. You are nothing and everything. You are a single moment and all eternity. You are the universe in motion.

Well done.

Nature

THE SKY HAS been shown to soothe us.

In 2018 a research study conducted by King’s College London found that being able to see the sky helps our mental health. And not just the sky. Seeing trees, hearing birdsong, being outside, and feeling in contact with nature.

Participants in the study went out into the world, and were instructed to record their mental states at different locations. Interestingly, the study was quite nuanced as it factored in each individual’s risk of developing poor mental health by doing some early tests on each participant to assess impulsive behaviours.

The study, catchily titled ‘Urban Mind: Using Smartphone Technologies to Investigate the Impact of Nature on Mental Wellbeing in Real Time’, found that while being out in the natural world is good for everyone, it is of particular benefit for those who are more predisposed to mental health problems like addiction, ADHD, antisocial personality disorder and bipolar disorder.