What Really Matters?

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Late Fragment, by RAYMOND CARVER

A question I’ve been asking myself recently is, what really matters to me? It’s all too easy, I find, to be seduced into allowing certain things to assume an inflated level of importance. But what is it that brings a deep-seated sense of fulfilment, as opposed to a shallow hit?

Having recently published a book, I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to publicise it. This has involved pitching to various media, and sending out lots of emails. I realised I’d started obsessively checking my inbox for responses, sometimes as often as every few minutes, living in anticipation of the high of a yes, or the sinking sensation of a no. I’d become a slave to my screen, constantly engaging with its hollow energy, via a nervous system always on alert for praise or rejection.

It didn’t feel great, and I recognised I needed to shift my attention. For away from my screen, there was a whole world unfolding; a world full of richness and texture. A world that, when I poured myself into it, kept showing me that this is enough. Witnessed in my walk home through the autumn park at dusk, with its smoky air and golden leaves, the sounds of joggers’ feet pounding its paths and overheard snippets of conversation: Mary needs to quarantine as she came from Canada…Only half the road is open...

The closer I can be to this world - including in the mundanity of peeling potatoes or making the bed - the more it reminds me that it is, in itself, enough. My body responds by feeling more grounded and content, less edgy. It is, of course, a practice. One I need to come back to again and again and again, in order to become less aligned with the stories floating round my mind, which can easily deceive me into thinking that what really matters is an acceptance or a rejection from someone who’s never even met me.

I also decided to limit checking email to a maximum of four times a day, and never before 8am, or after 8pm. I don’t always manage, but when I do I feel the difference. When the itch to check more often arises, instead of just reacting to it, I try to drop into the discomfort of that urge and sit with the sensations until they pass. Undoing the conditioning that tells me my value is determined by how much I achieve is a life-long practice. To instead learn in my cells that being here, as part of this life, this earth, this human heart is enough.

One of the yeses I did receive was from Red magazine. You can read my piece in the November 2020 issue here.