The Here and Now

Looking back over Looking Back... (below), I realise I left out perhaps the most important thing about the drugs. No, not that they're great - thanks, Worm! - but that they were a short cut to total immersion in the here and now, that here and now that becomes increasingly hard to focus on as the busyness of life crowds in around us, occupying so much of our minds with what is not here, not now. I recently read (on Bryan's recommendation) Tim Parks's Teach Us To Sit Still. This is a very readable, disarmingly honest and often funny book. It tells how the author's desperation in the face of what seemed to be symptoms of a potentially fatal prosrate condition led him, having explored all medical avenues to no avail, to seek solutions in therapeutic approaches he wouldn't normally have touched with a bargepole. In the end, he learnt that his problem was something deeper-seated than a medical condition, and that the only way to address it was to learn to sit still, to breathe correctly, and to lose himself in the here and now. None of which is easy. Clearly a driven and ultra-tense man, Parks also had to overcome the affliction common to all writers - that they instantly and instinctively translate the here and now into carefully composed words, thereby throwing up a barrier between themselves and the actual experience. His account of his efforts to overcome this - and so much else - makes remarkably gripping reading. Teach Us to Sit Still is a rare example of what happens when the kind of book you wouldn't normally touch with a bargepole is written by a writer who can actually write, and think, and laugh at himself. I'd recommend it to anyone - especially those who are driven and ultra-tense, if any such read this blog. Which seems unlikely.