One year on

I have, once again, come to spend January in Tenerife. Again, I found myself at a loose end, lacking direction and struggling for answers. The cold was bothering me, the speed and the stress of London were bothering me, what’s new? A year on, I am sitting at the same desk where I wrote this post, feeling the same feelings, and wondering what I have to show from the past 12 months. If life is a journey, then why am I not going anywhere?

As a child, you have the assurance that you will grow as you get older, both physically and mentally. Progress is linear enough; with time, you learn more and more about how to conduct yourself, how to cope with difficult emotions, how to make and keep friends, how to succeed, how to rest, how to see yourself in and amongst the ocean of things you appear not to be. Then, just like the steady physical growth that you have come to know through your first decades of life, your inner growth slows, with exposure to new concepts becoming increasingly hard to come by. If you want to keep learning, you have to go looking for the lessons. Whilst this plateau is completely standard, it is still strange to witness your own stagnation in real-time. Sitting where I sat before, realising the same things I already knew and since forgot, I see the passing of time like a reel winding out of my back, down and around the slow-spinning Earth and circling right back to my front. After a whole extra year of effort and experience, and I feel pitifully unchanged.

I have been in Tenerife for a little over a week at the time of writing this. When I arrived, I felt hollowed out, almost decaying. I was unwell, with a lingering illness from mid-December, an acute lack of focus, and a dismal outlook on life. A stressful few weeks and the consequential overindulgence in food and alcohol transported my mind far away from my body, so much so that when I arrived on my yoga mat underneath the ever-watching moon - she who had seen me grow from the day I was born only to later witness my failure to keep it up - I sobbed.

Having last year’s writing as a guide, I had a better idea of what mindset to bring with me to Tenerife this time around. I remembered the uncomfortable feeling that space and solitude brought up for me at the outset of my previous stay, and so this year I came prepared for an ugly period of rebalancing. I am using a couple of different models upon which to base the intentions I have set for the four weeks I will spend here: the first is the seasons. I cast my first week as Winter - a period of hibernation and solace. Over my first few days on the island, I journalled obsessively, I observed a 30-hour fast, I made minimal contact with anyone I met, and I welcomed the possibility of crying at any given moment. It was like rehab for my heart. I have given myself the opportunity to become spiritually, mentally and physically well, and I am now in the next phase of my self-guided retreat, building up to becoming Summer Grace – she who is open and joyful (and tanned).

The second framework I am using to guide the weeks I'll spend here is a book that my best friend gifted to me for my birthday last year. In The Margins is a collection of four essays written by my favourite author, Elena Ferrante. She wrote the Neapolitan Novels, probably the most beautiful, poignant and life-affirming books I have ever read, which I finished on the day I left Tenerife last January. The four essays I am now reading are reflections ‘on the pleasures of reading and writing’. Perhaps I don’t need to highlight the relevance of this book, at this time, for this failing writer.

The first essay is called Pain and Pen, and talks about the difference between good writing and inspired writing. Ferrante introduces the idea that so often writers conform to expectations, behave themselves within the constraints of what they are taught, and produce work that is by all accounts adequate but by no means exceptional. Here I think we can extrapolate to include the entire human population in the applications of their respective vocations. It is only with the freedom to lose oneself in the exploration of thought and emotion and truth that a genuine streak of inspiration may rear its head. This offers an important metaphor for my life over the last year: like many people for the duration of their adult lives, I have been going through the motions, fulfilling my responsibilities and, with the remainder of my time, finding pockets to switch off, leaving little opportunity for focussed creativity.

I haven’t written anything that I have wanted to share in over a year. That is far from coincidence; my life in London doesn’t allow for it, or rather, I don’t allow my life to allow for it. In contrast, the space and change of pace that I gift myself when I come here gives me chance to let buried feelings float to the surface which, if I’m lucky, might release some grain of inspiration from within. Everybody has this channel, although it is worth noting that not everyone has equal opportunity to hop off the fast-moving train of everyday life.

It is perhaps to be expected that I appear to be in the same place now as I was this time last year, both literally and figuratively. I am living in roughly the same place, doing roughly the same job, seeing roughly the same people, and I am generally very satisfied with these living conditions, with little reason to want to change them. However, having forced myself to take my foot off the gas, I am relearning the simple fact that having your pedal on the metal may move the car quickly, but it renders the inside of the car vulnerable and tense. To properly absorb the landscape we're travelling through, we need to slow down and look. To meet the basic needs of our hard-working driver, we need to let her stop driving once in a while. In this way and only with the perspective of distance, I can see the ways that my lifestyle is not set up in a way that lets me notice small, beautiful magic.

I can clearly see how I have arrived at the same place, with the same burn-out. If it takes two trips to Tenerife to stop my foot from hitting the floor too often this year, to give myself more space, time and freedom to find inspiration, then I think I’m on to a winner. Otherwise, I’ll have to find something new to say this time next year.